A Skewed View

I never mean to discount anyone's experience. I think grouping people up is a bullshit waste of time.

And yet I'm pretty certain that my friends are almost always one of two types of people.

Some of them were raised and bred to be successful, in the most traditional sense of the word. They had concerned and present parents. They had sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers who all finished high school and went on to college, or some hobby turned into a career that they loved.

Their parents stayed married - if not out of love then out of a sense of duty that is just as awe-inspiring as actual love is, a lot of the time. They grew up to understand dedication.

Those folks, at the very least, were sort of shown the way to a very stable means of living and co-existing. They saw a sketch of happiness growing up. In extreme cases they got everything they ever could have asked for and then even more.

And then they said "fuck it."

And then they decided to take another path.

And then they decided that maybe not college but maybe instead rapping or painting or selling drugs or bumming around or adventuring or anything else other than a straight and narrow life was a better use of their time.

That's one group.

The other group is the opposite and exactly the same. We came from not very much. We saw sporadic role modeling and faulty day to day functioning as the norm. Our parents tuned out. Spaced out. Dropped out of not just parenthood, but responsibility altogether.

For those kids. Those kids like me.

Our desires to be More and Better and Loved don't come from what we have seen. They come from what we never saw.

We didn't grow up around folks who could set examples of happiness, or dedication, or faith, or love.

We made all of those things up ourselves, often based on just imagining the exact opposite of what we saw in front of us.

Does that skew the view a bit?

Fuck yes, it does.

So yeah. Those are the 2 kinds of people I gravitate toward. I tend to identify more with one type than the other.

And then there are the Others.

So I guess maybe all of this amounts to not very much at all. Just some random thoughts for a random Wednesday night.

Here's to a random Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday too - right?

Right.

Night.