F***ing Fair-Weather Friends

And so Billy was still friends with Jack, even though he could no longer run and jump and play basketball and now just blew a stupid, shrill whistle that scared away all the butterflies, and he probably smelled like pee.

Friend[frend]

–noun

1. a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.

2. a person who only contacts you when she needs something or when she needs to whine all about herself, or who jams her jagged knife in your back over and over and over as soon as the opportunity arises.

I’m cynical. And a shitty friend myself. Long-distance, that is. Phone conversations with me usually consist of the other party’s yelling assorted distorted blurbs and my bleating, “What? What?” multiple times until we both give up, exhausted and angry, with absolutely no communication whatsoever having taken place. Sucks.

I prefer email, but everyone else has moved on to texting, and I’m just getting the hang of that. Honestly, though, a face-to-face is the only true way for friends to catch up because they need the immediacy and the ability to see each other’s facial expressions and gestures and personalities and hidden meanings. And to hug if necessary. So I shun long-distance discourse most of the time, and since I can’t seem to get people all to live in some kind of compound with me, my friendships go global, get strained and then vanish.

Every now and then I’ll have a friend with whom I share a bond so strong that even the separation of many years and miles can’t make a dent. Or I think that for a while until I find out that I’m just kidding myself. My mother used to say, “You can count your true friends on one hand,” and I fucking hated that, almost as much as I hate admitting she was right. But my mother also said stuff like, “Eat that gristle. It isn’t going to hurt you,” so I have to wonder about the validity of many of her pronouncements. Anyway, she was accurate about the friends.

I usually love my friends so much that I’d do anything for them—even though it’s not like I have a lot to offer—which is funny because the origin of the word friend is some ancient word I cannot pronounce that means to love. I adore my friends, so it’s okay if they cry on my shoulder and get snot on my favorite t-shirt, or want to go out for dessert in the middle of the day so we can laugh at the stupid crap other people do, or if they think or say or do just about anything other than, like, murder someone I love or betray me.

As we all know, love tends to cloud our perceptions. We don’t realize that the person we love is telling all our fucking deepest secrets to anyone within earshot until the shit gets back to us. We don’t see the underlying jealousy and hatred until it’s too late. And we keep going back and back and back to toxic folks like a dog to its vomit, an image I’ve always found completely disgusting and gag-full, especially when you know that a dog will also eat its poo, which means that it can eat some bad cheese, vomit it out, go back and eat that, then poo the puke, and then eat the shit-of-upchucked-cheese. Son of a bitch! Buffy is never licking my mouth ever again. And this is exactly why when so-called friends treat you like shit that you should not keep going back to the buffet. You have let yourself become shit-of-upchucked-cheese!

Gack. I need a bath.

Fair-weather friends are people who only support you or come around when it is easy and convenient for them. Fuck that! I want tornado friends. Tsunami friends. Or at the very least severe-thunderstorm-warning friends. I am a crazy, deaf, loud, prone-to-bouts-of-extreme-depression, highly opinionated woman who isn’t afraid to point out how everything should be done. I am a fricking hurricane. So anyone who can’t seek shelter and ride out the tempest better not sign on.