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Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, United States

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Feast of friends

Throughout my life, I’ve moved all around. It seemed like everytime we got settled in and I felt like I had a group of friends who had accepted me in, the word would come down that it was time to pull up stakes again. Some places I’d have great friends, other places I’d never really fit in. If I had grown up in one of those places where I found a really great friend, or a great group of friends, then I would have never known what its like to be without that. If I had grown up in one of those places where I never fit in, never found true friends, then I would have never really known what it was that I was missing out on. But having lived in both situations, I was acutely aware of how valuable real friendship can be, and truly missed it when it wasn’t there. Through your life there are often a lot of “Best friends” or at least there are when you move around like I do. I think my first best friend was Jeff Wilcox, in Cleveland, Ohio, and then Scott, in Chicago, still one of the best friends I’ve ever had. And it still breaks my heart a bit that he doesn’t want to stay in touch now that we’re older. Later in Columbus there was Brian and Dave, and also Devon. Mike Mitchell in Atlanta, and Chris Hardy in College. Of all those, only Chris Hardy really kept in touch, and still stayed a friend after I moved away, rather than just an acquaintance. Unfortunately I moved away from Chris a long time ago. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a real best friend. The kind of best friends they make buddy movies about, where you do everything together, and you never have to question their loyalty, or how much of a friend they really are. Its strange, because it seems like the older you get, the harder it is to make a real bond with a guy. Us guys don’t exactly go around sharing our feelings with everyone on the street (A BLOG IS NOT THE STREET, SO SHUT UP!), so such things don’t happen easily. In fact in many ways I thought that true friendships like the ones I remembered from way back could not be started so late in life; that they needed too much history to be able to exist, that the jaded rocky ground of adulthood was a bit too rough for such things to sprout anew. But I was apparently wrong. In the last few months I’ve found a new best friend. The kind they make buddy pics about. And yes, it sounds gay, but I don’t care, friends are vastly important to me, and I’m really glad to have found such a good friend. Wednesday after my Yuma issues we went out to drink – not to pick up chicks (not that we didn’t try), but to hang out as friends and drink and talk. And it was really cool. We even talked sort of directly about our friendship. You know, in guy-talk, i.e.
“Hey man, you know . . .”
“Yeah, *grunt*”
And that’s pretty much all that needs to be said. In fact, among men, I think even that degree of open emotional discussion between men usually calls for being at a strip bar so that any ideas of being gay for talking about feelings with another man can quickly be dealt with by a lapdance.

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