Mikhail Was a Friend of Mine

Whenever my past intersects my present, I always take a second to stop and consider whether I wish that this thing or person were still in my life.  Usually, it's people from Tifton or Shorter that look me on FB.

And, sadly, usually I don't miss them.

Take tonight's find.  We'll call him Mikhail in this age of Googling ourselves.  Mikhail was someone that I was friendly with in high school.  He acted the part of the philosopher.  If we had gone to school in the city, I'm sure he would have read a lot of Camus and psychedelic poetry while preaching that everything we were taught was simultaneously beneath him and a lie.  He was someone who believed that truth came from pop culture.  He was one of the few people I knew who still believed in the power of parables.  He could play chess.  For some reason, it seemed like he wasn't built to any model.  I stole pieces of him that I liked and modeled parts of my life after that.  He left before my junior year.

The one time I saw him after he left my daily existence, he proved himself to be one of the most homophobic people in my social set.  Until that point, I thought that ignorance equated to prejudice, but on that Halloween night, that illusion was shattered.  (On a side note, that was one of two nights that proved to me that I will never want to be a cool kid).

I guess I like that Mikhail friended me on FB.  It gave me the chance to think of old conversations and old lies.  He's a great example from my high school life of when I realized that everyone had the potential for great good and great evil at the same time.  And it proved to me what I've come to internalize recently:  pretension blows.  People consistently describe what I say or write, no matter how much work is put into it, as "raw."  Maybe it's because I don't give a shit what other people think about the words I say, I want them to get the message, and I'll use whatever verbal weaponry is necessary to do that.

And people who talk and circles and argue for its own sake and break out of boxes for the sake of breaking and nothing more, I guess that's their prerogative.  But if I'm going to do something to waste time, I'd rather watch SVU.