I'm not great in bed.
I try to be, but I'm held back by two issues, one of them physical and the other mental. The physical is that as I'm as flexible as your average erection three seconds before orgasm, so certain positions are beyond me. The mental is that I'm incapable of roleplay. If you want me to pretend to be someone else, go be with someone else. I won't mind. But it's..limiting.
I'm told I have skills to compensate.
I'm not great at love.
I try to be, but I'm held back by my own need to be loved. Like so many of my flaws and shortcomings, I think I've conquered this and it recurs on me at intervals.
My wife would disagree vociferously that I'm not great at love. We muse often that we were clearly meant to be lifemates largely because we're the only ones who can put up with each other. (Mark has since proven we aren't entirely alone in the world.) And, I mean, I do try hard and succeed more often than I fail nowadays. But my failures can be pretty spectacular.
I'm told I have skills to compensate; I've built my life augmenting them.
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Friendship now. Not only am I not great at it, I'm downright awful at it. Always have been. I lacked a sibling to show me the ropes, and I didn't get to interact with many kids my own age early on. That persisted into school: for the first four years, junior kindergarten to second grade, I kept to myself religiously. I've told you about grade three, which started well and ended badly. Gordon stuck by me; Mark Stanski started as a friend and for reasons never explained turned into my first enemy. He was the guy who crept up behind me and squeezed my balls like he was trying to pop them. They turned black. My mother told Eva many years later she was certain that incident had sterilized me.
My stepdad John came into my life in the summer between grades two and three; he married my mom in the summer between grades three and four. We moved to London and I've related this story before, too. I got glasses the same summer, so I'd left grade three a veteran of kissing tag and entered grade four as SUPERNERD! The bullying that had actually started late the last year took hold with a vengeance. Nobody would dare to be my friend that year, and I can't blame them. Not only was I completely unfit, befriending me would have just given the bullies a BOGO.
My friendless state was not acceptable to John. He booted me out of the house and told me to "go make friends". I didn't know how to "make friends" any more than I knew how to make duck a l'orange, and so I'd ride all over London on my bike, come home and detail all the fictional baseball games I'd played with "friends" whose names suspiciously matched the characters in whatever book I was reading at the time. I spent hours and hours talking to dial tones. (The modern equivalent would be texting yourself while pretending to text someone else.) I was pathetic. The bullying was only my just deserts.
In grades five and six I had all of one friend and I have no idea how or why he became one. His name was Tim and we were polar opposites in many ways. He was an avid birder; bird chirps at 5:00 a.m. only made me wish I had a gun. He was in every extracurricular activity known to man; I considered homework an extracurricular activity and it was enough for me. But we meshed somehow. His was the only "normal" friendship I ever had. By which I mean we did the sorts of things boys tend to do, and little Ken-who-still-sometimes-felt-like-a-baby-Kenny had never considered these sorts of games.
We worked together at Cornell's Fruit Farm, which was long ago paved over. We'd pick up rotten apples from the ground and whip them at each other. Rotten apples only: the fresh ones would hit like rocks, whereas these would just kind of splooze on your shirt and REEK like nobody's business.
You have to understand that this is NOT the sort of game Kenny ever imagined himself playing. Kenny had seen all manner of things thrown around his home years earlier, and he'd seen more than enough of those things connect. Rotten apples weren't the same, but at first they felt the same. Why would friends throw things at each other? Soon enough I realized the energies felt completely different and began to appreciate how this could be fun....even if it horrified my mother, who did the laundry.
We built snow forts in my backyard in the winter. We had sleepovers at his place, played the first generation of computer games on his Tandy, and had an apocalyptic raisin fight in his basement. We emptied a bag full of boxes of raisins. Hundreds of them. He and his family were still finding desiccated raisin corpses years later.
Friends.
Until late in grade six when his parents, out of the blue, decided I wasn't Tim's kind of people. Probably had something to do with the crush I developed on his sister. I never did anything about that crush, but soon I didn't have the chance to.
Losing him was awful because for the first time in my life, the loneliness I felt had a name. Before Tim, I had no idea I was lonely, having never experienced any other state of being. (Even Gordon and the girls in grade three didn't really touch the loneliness because they were very strictly school friends. I went to Gordon's house once; he came to mine in London, once.)
Grades seven and eight. New school again. "Gifted" program. No homework. No friends, either: us "gifties" self-segregated from the (mun)"'danes" that made up the rest of the school, and the kids in my class were actively hostile since their "gifts" (in math and science) didn't match mine (most of the other subjects). There weren't many social skills to go around those classes, either, as you might imagine.
I do remember one incident in grade eight. We were going on a field trip to Ottawa, which really deserves its own blog: it was eventful and the trip home was calamitous. But before any of that, there was the rooming arrangements to work out. We were four to a room, two queen size beds. Mom hit the roof: that meant her son would be sharing a bed with another boy. She didn't actually say this was going to turn me into one of those dreaded homosexuals...but I know for a fact that's what she was thinking. She called the school and put a few people on blast. I ended up rooming with Johnathan McPhail and ONLY Johnathan, so I had my own bed and so did he and guess what? That didn't stop the gay chatter. The privacy he and I had compared to everyone else was proof positive we'd at least sucked each other off, according to the rest of my class.
He was the closest thing I had to a friend that year.
Grade nine. Another move. Oakridge S.S. No friends here, not in grades nine or ten. This sounds insane and I swear it's true...I was asked probably fifteen times when my parents did for a living on the first day. My answers were damning, and I was shunned from that moment on. I'd walk into the cafeteria, pick a table to sit at and no matter which it was, every body at that table would get up and find room at other tables. I took about a week of this before eating my lunch in the music room.
It wasn't until grade eleven and Westminster S.S. where I found a welcoming environment and managed to make friends -- two of whom are still friends today. And I don't know how I made either of them.
Oh, Darlene was a case of love at first sight that I had to tamp down all year long. She taught me a lot about friendship by allowing that friendship and nothing else. Craig, on the other hand...complete mystery. I guess taking an interest in his trumpet playing, which was so far beyond the typical high school student's that it had me in total awe, was enough to seed that friendship, but I'm always amazed anyone would want to BE my friend anyway, thanks to all those periods when nobody did.
I was at Westminster for grade eleven only. It was the best year of my schooling career.
I skipped grade 12 and found myself at Ingersoll District C.I. for grade 13, what's now called OAC year. I didn't want to be there at the beginning of the year and didn't want to leave by the end. By this time I had sanded down my rough edges (some of them, at least) and nobody shunned me or bullied me. I sometimes think any high school student does a cost-benefit analysis on befriending anyone new. Do other kids beat this guy up? Does he, to use the modern vernacular, pass the vibe check? In grade 13 I did, and I made a small cotillion of friends, headed by Kieron and Jen. Both attended my wedding twelve years later, the latter at my side next to my best man, whom I ALSO met in grade 13 but didn't befriend until he called me up out of nowhere the following summer and proposed rooming with me at Laurier. "We're both quiet, we both like classical music, we're both not fans of commotion, what do you think?" Jay asked me, and that first year we were the Odd Couple. His side of the room was spotless, his bed made with military precision each and every morning. My side reflected the fact I no longer had a mother hovering over me to ensure I did pointless things like make my bed. (I'm just going to get into this tonight, what's the big deal?)
I'll stop this compendium of friendships now. Other people came and went, waxed and waned, throughout my adult years until this very day. The wanings were and are difficult for me to deal with: they provoke ancient abandonment issues, but more notably it's like someone tore off their piece of my life's tapestry and forevermore whenever I look at that part of the whole, I'll find a part and a hole instead.
In a few instances I KNOW I am at fault. As I confessed at the beginning of this little trilogy, I haven't always been loving towards those I love. (And of course I love my friends...a friendship, to me, is a love with no sex and no romance, but can be every bit as deep as a relationship that DOES have sex and romance in it.) But where I don't know, I'm never told.
To be clear, I'm not owed an explanation. But where one exists, I'd sure like to know it so I don't inadvertently push other people away the way I pushed you.
Why have I told you all this? To show you the pattern. Growing up, I didn't have friends, then I did, then I didn't again, over and over. A very deep part of me lives in terror of losing the friends I have. A slightly less deep part of me has learned over time that expressing that terror makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And so I hesitate. What's the correct number of times to text a friend in a month? Nobody tells you this shit and it's CRITICAL information. Too seldom and they think I don't care. Too frequent and get away you fucking needy clingy barnacle. Then there's the CONTENT of the texts. Gotta maintain the balance of light and heavy, serious and sarcastic.
It doesn't help much that you humans have taken vitally important questions and statements and turned them into small talk that may or may not mean anything. I'm thinking primarily here of two examples, though there are others.
1) "How are you?"
Don't answer this question honestly. You're not supposed to. You are expected to lie and say you're fine. The more not-fine you are, the more earnest your lie must be. Everyone is expecting "fine, and you?" and then they'll say they're also fine (even if they're suicidal) and get to the real point of why they're talking to you.
An experiment. The next ten times somebody asks you how you are, answer "shitty!" in a bright, smiley tone. Even odds it'll go unnoticed; I've run this experiment more than once. I'm reminded of an old, old game show where the host asked the woman contestant what her husband did for a living (because this was how women identified themselves in the early 1960s) and one woman told the host her husband had been dead for three years. "Oh, isn't that special," said the host, and moved on.
I'm not like that. If I ask you how you are, I'm fully prepared for you to announce you're at the end of your rope.
But "how are you" is nothing to "we should get together!"
Really? Really? You really mean that? I bet you don't mean that. Most people don't actually mean that. Wanna know how I know? I've made a complete ass of myself more than once following up on those words. "Hey, wanna get together? How's next weekend?" "Oh, sorry, I have to iron the cat that weekend. I'm going to be sick. (Yes, somebody once told me they were going to be sick at the time I offered to see them; needless to say, I never spoke to that person again). Often there's this pause as the person goes through their excuse Rolodex; what it feels like is "get together? With you? EWWWWWWWWWWWW." Now, when I hear "we should get together", I thank the person and wait to see if they mention it again.
Rare.
I'm 52 years old and very much a child when it comes to this stuff. The friends I have managed to keep are cherished not just for themselves, but for their willingness to put up with me. Few have that strength, it seems.
Every love, for me, has friendship as a base. My wife is my closest friend. Any other partner is likewise a friend first. I think I do that out of self-preservation: it makes it easier to keep the friendship once the love has changed character. Apart from Eva, it inevitably does. As such, virtually every former love I have is still a friend of some description. That really means something to me.
I've been pretty hard on myself here, but that's pure authenticity: I've always found friendship difficult to navigate. I've always gotten along better with girls than boys, largely because I am a creature of many, many emotions. And so I have lots of "friends who are girls who are not my girlfriends". Male friendships, by the code, are private things. I would take a bullet for Craig and somehow it never seems appropriate to ask him the simplest details of his life, even though he's told me he's an open book to me. I don't need all the details to love the guy like a brother, mind.
Nor do I need to see you in real life to consider you a friend. But it is my preference.
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NEXT BLOG, POSSIBLY NEXT WEEKEND, NOT BEFORE: FUTURE PLANS COALESCING
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