"friends reunited"

I was just going through the "friends reunited" website, and looking at people I used to know at school. I looked at the comments I'd left about what I do now, and I realise that it's quite irrelevant what I do now, and I have no interest in the people I knew then. Not really. I feel so uninvolved with them, for starters. And the truth is that I don't like the people I knew then when I was a kid. People I grew up with, like one friend who lost his arm in a motorcycle accident a few years back, I realise were never my friends he in particular isn't my friend now.

It's odd, the way we break away from people. We can look at someone we thought we knew and needed really well, and realise that they were no good to us at all. I have no regrets whatsoever in never hearing from nor seeing old friends from the past. I've grown away from them.

I can't help wondering, though, just how much they've got themselves stuck in ruts. How much are they victims of the whole "do well for yourself in the eyes of others" brigade, that I know I've been a victim of, too.

How much do old friends ponder on the kinds of things I think about often, I wonder?

I don't know.

Heigh ho.

Am I an oddball? I don't know. I know I was a deeply unhappy kid. Very lonely, and very alone.

But I have no regrets about escaping the environment that I grew up in. It's done me so much good to do what I've done, and get away as I have.

I felt it might have been a chance for me to write something about what I do now, here in Austin. But I don't want to, to those people. Call it sour grapes, or whatever you like, but I just don't want to know those people any more. They represent a life that I let go of, and have grown away from.

I wish them all happiness. But I just don't like nor need what they stand for any more.

Truth is, there was never really an intimacy with them. Just like my parents, they stayed within certain parameters that suited them and suited the conditioning that I was subjected to. Had I stayed in London, I'd probably be the kind of person I now don't really want to know all that much.

I dunno. Maybe they've changed. Grown up, or something. Maybe not. I don't think I'll know. And frankly, I don't really care any more.

What makes us want to know about other people's lives and how they've gone, I wonder? Is it the whole existential comparison thing? "Have I done as well as you or better?" and all that? I'm sure there's an element of that. Of course there is. I wonder if people like Anthony Hopkins join such things? Somehow I doubt it...

But you never know.

I feel tempted to actually engage some people in finding out what's really going on in their lives. But I think I can pretty well guess what is. They have the usual domestic, conditioned lives that most western suburban people have. They have their problems and their issues, I suppose.

And I know that, for me, the whole business of fitting in has been a weird one my entire life. I never really did fit in, what with being so screwed up and low in self esteem as a kid. And the self esteem issues are still there, I know, when I look back at stuff like "friends reunited"

But I realise that much of the trauma stuff that I've mentioned in the previous entries is tied up with school stuff and old schoolfriends. There's little point in reestablishing actual relationships with the real people, as they've simply moved on in their lives. The best I can do is Gestalt what they were to me, and the trauma that I'm left with, if any, as a result of having anything to do with them.

It's interesting how self consciousness comes up, though, when I think about what they might be thinking, either about me, or about themselves in relation to me.

One person I'd like to know about is someone called Paul who I knew as a 17 year old. He cracked up, went into a mental hospital, came out and became a kind of walking vegetable, living with his parents right through adulthood. He's probably still with them now.

poor Paul.

Life.

It's a funny old game.

And I wonder just how much love is there in the life of my old, one armed friend, with whom I had a homosexual experience on my 16th birthday, or thereabouts. He's married now, with two kids, but I reckon he's still got some unworked sexual issues, and some traumas of his own. In that respect, it'd be interesting to hear from him, just to get an accurate lowdown on how his life has panned out. But I know I wouldn't get an honest answer from him, just games. So what's the point?

So friends reunited is something I have no time for.