All My Friends Are Geniuses

It's true.

I'm like a moth circling the overhead light in a bathroom. A homeless man in a coat, waiting outside of the bar. A juicy worm, ringed and wrinkled, feasting off the soil in big thirsty gulps.

I have friends who are special. In many different ways. My writer friends are fiercely, bravely special to me. Most of the time I ignore them. I think they think I don't care about them--but sometimes the proof of their own determination is too much for me to bear. And sometimes, it is just because they are, like most writers, comfortable veering toward unbearable self-absorption.
Nick is a friend like that. A friend is even a loose term. We went to school together. I remember his legs, thin in his jeans, dark skin that looked like an old baseball mitt, one of those grins that trekked up on one side across his teeth. He was cute, and he didn't notice me much, not like the beautiful girl in our class he fell in love with, or the funny and poetic and thrilling guys that he still calls on the phone, or our teacher, who has a Ph.D in Being Sexy and Smart--the one that inspired him.
Now we write each other, or he writes me. He writes. It's silly to say that he writes me. And I read his stories when I'm not supposed to--laying (lying?) on the couch with my boyfriend, or slumping on an elbow on my desk at work--it somehow always feels wrong.
Part of the reason is because he's an addict. There's always a fear that's stuck in my head--a girl in my high school, Christine, once asked me if I cut my arms because I wanted to be a better writer, or I wanted people to think I was. And it makes me think, man, these heroin dreams, you can't just pat them on the head for writing their most depraved moments out for you--like a junkie jukebox, to paraphrase Dudley Randall. They'll just run out and create more nightmares to transcribe, and one day he'll be cold in an alley somewhere with his tongue hanging out and a Cleveland Browns hat falling off his head.
I don't like to joke about it much. I think it hurts me more than it hurts him.
But I'm a liar. Just as much as it hurts me, I yearn for his stories the way he needs whatever drug he's using that day. Because part of me knows that Christine is right, or believes it, at least. There's some dark art woven into the fabric of words, and it can't be get at without stabbing at some skin to get to the muscle, no matter what you use to open up the vein.
Bad metaphor.
But I don't do that anymore. I guess I've become less complacent with That Life as I've gotten older. I'm soft. I want a nice place to live, sushi on the weekends, leather boots, cocktail money. I've put the comforts of adulthood--finding a Good Job, living in a Nice Place, having A Relationship--over what you need to do to have an art. Not to say you become a good writer by snorting coke or sitting at the bar. I think you become a good writer by shutting out the rest of the world to sit down and write every day, and any substance that can stave off that loneliness helps.
But I'm still lonely, in a different way, because writing was my friend, and I've lost her. I have these few, frustrated moments (now that I"m living in my parents' basement, maybe a few more) where I can--because the balance tips, and I let myself feel lonely and scared, without the benefit of comfort.
I read his stories because they make me think about living the life that he lives. A life without comfort, direction, or (let's be honest) any sense. I don't want to trade his life for mine, as surely as I don't want to morph into an electric eel tomorrow morning. But that wouldn't stop me from pressing my face against the tank, just to see him light up on the other side of the glass.

A Joke

This went over well on facebook:

Q: How many hipsters does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: It's a really obscure number, you've probably never heard of it.

:)

A quote

I'm reading a book by A.E. Hotchner, once a writer for Cosmopolitan in the late 1940s, back when the magazine used to commission stories by Hemingway, instead of quizzes with titles like "Do You Let Your Man Walk All Over You?" and articles about G-spots.
Hotchner became one of Hemingway's best friends, and wrote a book about him after "Papa Hemingway," as the memoir is called, shot himself in the head.

"There are some things which cannot
be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have,
mus be paid heavily for their acquiring.
They are the very simplest things,
and because it takes a man's life to know them
and the little new that each man gets from life
is very costly and the only heritage
he has to leave."
Ernest Hemingway