Jerusalem Bells
You’ve got one good quality: you appreciate good things in other people. In that way, people would say you have good taste.
You may be a festering pit yourself, but you’ve got this capacity for knowing the potential in others. If you could shed your baggage, you might make a good teacher. But who would take you as you are? You’re too judgmental. That’s the other thing: you’re judgmental, so the good people must be REALLY good. It’s a shame you don’t like art. You’d make a great critic.
You’re a lousy partner in a relationship, but you pick great partners to be with. You’re like the guy who picks the girl in the movies who desperately needs a makeover. You watched a movie once that spoofed that. The girl takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and suddenly she’s seriously hot shit. To you it’s not so different in real life. You wonder how other people don’t get it to let this girl fall through the cracks and into your hands. When you’re done molding her–when she’s discovered that she’s great at sex and sexy and only needs to let her hair down and take her glasses off–she’ll move on. But until then, you’ve got months of satisfaction before she realizes how much better she could do with someone of substance. You’re a great critic, but you’ve never created anything of your own.
It’s not so different with your friends. You’re a facilitator. You have good taste, and other people see that in you, and somehow they see the veneer and extrapolate too much, and you’re a “nice guy.” A funny guy. You’re a facilitator because you see the good in them and want to emulate it. And then the thing they had in them all along begins to blossom, and the good qualities they thought they saw in you, they borrow. After a while, they embody. Believe. They form a code based on a version of you that is better than you and impossible to attain. Not so long in the future, they abandon you, because the part of you they “borrowed”–the bullshit detector–alerts them to your scuminess. Until then, you borrow memories from them of times you had when you were similar, in the overlap between their growth and your good image. This sustains you until you find someone else who latches on to something you said that had promise. Maybe they’ll have the strength to finish your thought. Maybe they’ll grow.
You wonder how it will end for you. In the back of your mind you think that you have never seriously imagined yourself old. To do so would be depressing. You know that you’re incapable of growth. At this young age you feel retarded. Imagine 50. Your friends would have outpaced you in every conceivable way. They would have had major successes; houses; children. You see yourself in an apartment with debt. You don’t have promise. You lack potential. Potential is a thing for young men. When you reach a certain age, it’s squandered; and squandered potential is like an oil field burned out of spite. When you burn it you decide you want to be smiling, so at least you give the impression of wanting to be destroyed. Really you just want to be loved. But who would love you as you are?
