Distance makes the heart grow fonder

or "the pain of belonging"

Part 1

They were going to their dads birthday. The three of them lived in three different corners of the country, and Andy didnt drive. Lost his license years ago, never got it back. So his brother picked him up at a train station and drove him the rest of the way. There was a tension about it, but talking about it would mean talking about his drinking problem, so they didnt. They just made it work.

They talked for a while about the weather, sports, netflix. They didnt talk much any more. It was hard getting back to the way things was. Once upon a time, his older brother was his best friend. Every time they talked, Andy always ended up deciding the same thing – I should call a little more often, just to talk. There was love there, and a mutual guilt over not being better family. There was the loss of their grandmother hanging over them. There was their parents divorse hanging over them. Too much, too important stuff, to know where to begin. There was love there – but the culmination of all the shit there was to talk about, just the magnitude of all the meaningful, important stuff they had to talk about, almost made it a certainty that it would result in fighting. Not because they had any disagreements or anything to fight about, really. Just the magnitude of the ordeal. It wasnt tension and it wasnt strain.

Christian put on a podcast. ”the setup is it’s these stand up comedians talking about ”their worst jobs”, and then they have a different guest in every episode”, he explained. Andy instantly understood the appeal of it, having listened to cumtown to fall asleep without brain zaps inducing anxiety attacks, for several years.

It was nice to have a little relief – if language is inherently problematising, then understanding is silence – and to be silent together is to be in accord. Externalising language to the machine, to the speakers in the car, to the phone, to the podcast app, to apple, to these ”comedians”, this externalises the need and process of language, and they could sit back and enjoy the fruits of it.

It was a long trip, and they sat mostly in silence for about an episode’s length. Occationally commenting or laughing at the anecdotes. Like training wheels for keeping their communication running, without having to fall into the dangerous terrain of talking about the suicides and alcoholism and how christian felt about the prospect of becoming a father.

The playlist tapped from one episode into the next. Andy felt a brain zap like the little freakouts he would have falling asleep. It almost never happened unless he was in bed.

”this weeks guest is a little of a curveball, in that he’s not a standup. But he’s a funny guy, and he’s also a loser alcoholic with a little speed habit, so he’s always fit right in” - cohost laughs - ”his name is Andy – whats your last name again dude? - anyways he’s always just ”been around” you know-”

Hearing his own voice on the radio – it sounded too high pitched, he was murmering, he was saying ”uhm, like” too much. Instant rush of shame. Andy looked over to his brother driving. Christian just looked straight ahead at the road. The sun had set and they were driving in the dark.

Andy didnt remember ever meeting these people – he hadnt seen local stand up in years. That was five, ten years back for him. He had a friend who did open mikes.

On the stereo he was asked to introduce himself.

”well I never really did stand up, although I had a friend I would drink with who did. Anyways I uh, I guess my claim to fame is poetry. Slam poetry. And let me stop you right there, its exactly as bad as it sounds.”

”but there’s more pussy in it”, the host interjected.

”ha, well, not really. Unless you count the performers. there’s different pussy in it, I would say. Art hoe pussy.”

Andy was dying from shame. He had only ever spoken this frankly to his brother a couple of times, before he got sober – while he was completely hammered. Christian just kept staring at the road.

Radio Andy then went on to tell a story about performing at music festivals – about running a poetry slam right next to an EDM stage, for a crowd of less than 20 people – about going to a music festival sober, and feeling terribly out of place.

”I thought about finding a guy to sell me some acid so I could at least be on *something*, you know.”

Andy had never talked about drugs with his brother. They had smoked pot, once. He knew he had been into pot for a little while. That was it. He didnt know anything about christian’s exposure to stuff like psychedelics or exstacy or cocaine – and there radio andy was, just regaling all these embarrasing stories of doing exstacy with a bunch of men, scamming a rich kid who wanted to be a stand up comedian and selling him cocaine for 10x market value. Exposed to his brother, in his stable marraige in his middle class suburban house, his normal normie life.

And he just laughed – at least, at the right parts, at the bits that were supposed to be punchlines.

”I love this podcast”, Christian said, staring straight ahead with an open and sincere smile on his face.

Part 2

Andy had found a new job, and he was having a lot of trouble settling in to it. He felt it was very much beneath him, to do manual labor. He didnt want to feel that way – in fact he had some very complex thoughts on the enobling aspect of manual labor – which made him feel ashamed, twice over. He was already ashamed of having wasted his talents for so long.

His trouble was in socialising - having spent many many years in a drug induced haze, and even more in self-imposed isolation (jerking off and doing lines), Andy had grown to functino without as strong a need for constant social affirmation, and this new environment of men constantly talking was unnerving to him. He knew intellectually, what his autistic mistake was: he would instinctively assume that a question posed, meant something, and it should be considered seriously, scientifically – when in fact, the entirety of the conversation at work was a simple call response game: marco, polo. To keep each other awake, and to feel connected; to take anything said literally was a mistake, he knew. And yet he couldnt stop constantly making a fool of himself, by actually taking what was being said literally and answering seriously.

Constant gossiping about the boss, behind his back. Andy found the lot of them to be twofaced hypocrites, who would talk shit behind his back, but lick spittle wheneever he was in the room. Andy knew that he was wrong – autistic – and that they were simply playing the game how it was supposed to be played, and that he was an idiot for projecting ”principles” out on the world. The social world most of all.

Two of the older guys would spend eight hours every say talking about movies – retelling plot points, scenes. No analysis, no comparising, just endlessly retelling the plot of movies and tv shows they had seen – and they were old guys, who had seen a lot of television and movies. For the three months Andy had owrked there, they never seemed to run out of material..

They spoke harshly to him and bossed him around – just because he was the new guy,. Just normal stuff, Andy knew. But dispite knowing, he couldnt help but take it personally. When he came in in the morning, the first word out of their mouth was something about how he looked ugly - “you didnt get enough sleep last night huh” - and Andy just sort of looked like that.

He tried very hard to force himself to fit in, try to give back as good as he got – this often ended in tragedy, as all of a sudden ball busting wasnt all fun and games any more. So most days, when he “didnt get enough sleep” and just wanted to get through the day, he just said nothing, and left them to their own devises, and spent the day thinking about the stories he would write, and the cutting edge political and philosophical discourse he partook in at night, under pseudonym, secretly, on the internet – creating the memes, both in the real sense of the word, and also the funny pictures, that eventually traveled from his anonymous circles, to reddit, to the mainstream internet, until finally hitting the scriptwriters, who wrote the shows and movies that people at work would retell each other, word for word, for eight hours a day.

Then at lunch, they would look at their facebook feeds and excitedly retell funny internet memes they saw.

Part 3

Andy was fighting with his roommate. They had been fighting for a couple of months – at this point it was too byzantine to really say what the root cause was. They were both too caught up in it. Andy thought the whole thing was about having to compromise, since they were sharing space. His roommate never guite seemed to know what he was upset about – but he was greatly upset. He would yell and scream and hit the walls, like in that funny internet meme that was going around a while back. Except they were not a married couple. Just a thirty year old failure and a late twenties manchild – by Andy’s estimation.

At the height of their conflict, he had sat up all night fuming and stweing in anger in their living room, which Andy had discovered as he woke up in the morning at 6 to go to work. For a while he started carrying a knife. The guy seemed unstable and incapable of controlling his anger. Andy was 99% sure it was all a bunch of larping, of “acting out” in a way that he had internalised from media, from the exact kind of “funny internet memes” one would see about this kind of thing. Hitting the wall in anger, after Andy had admitted to, one eevening, playing loud music to intentionally antagonise him – because this frank admission: “yes, I did it to provoke you”, made him realise that he had done the same – directly attempted to antagonize. And he could not accept this knowledge about himself, that he was such a person who would do such a thing – he thought he was a tolerant good guy, who would never intentionally do anything to cause another pain.

Andy knew himself a little better than that. He knew very well that he was capable of sadism. But in this case, he was doing it to teach him a lesson – this lesson – which is why he admitted to it the instant it came up.

They would fight and fight, and whenever things seemed to be settled, a hidden, core discontent kept brewing, until it exploded into a new fight – they never quite seemed to get to the bottom of it. Every time Andy talked him down, and they spent an entire evening talking it out, a couple of days later, things were back to square one.

“I just want to resolve the problem, and every time we talk you end up talking all this kind of bullshit high flown philosophical shit that doesnt go anywhere or solve anything, it pisses me off”, he would say.

Andy responsded that he thought there was no way to resolve their fundamental problem without getting down to fundamental principles.

There was a long way to go to get there, and at its core, Andy thought that his roommate was really upset about Andy having overstepped his boundaries, and reprimanded the roommates sister once, speaking very harshly to her. This had caused him to feel like less of a man, like his territory was being encroached on – and he has since then subconsciously tried to encroach in turn. And this had then slowly boiled for months and months, until it exploded out into all kinds of other small issues, small annoyances, which would otherwise have been mutually forgiveable. Border skirmishes in the war for cultural lebensraum, in their small apartment.

“I think the problem is that we dont know each other very well, and dont take an interest in each other. I dont think we can live in harmony, without taking an interest in each other”, Andy argued. “We have known each other for two years, and you have never asked to read any of my writing, for example. You dont even know what I do, what the purpose of my life is.”

“I know that you sit around jerking off all day like a fucking neet”

“and that makes you upset because you recognize yourself in it, you project your fear about yourself onto me – you see what you fear is true about yourself, in me”

“YES! And I have thought many times like, Andy just needs someone to fucking kick him in the ass, so he doesnt just sit and wallow in-”

“thatt’s what I mean, You see me and you have this moral impulse, you want to help me, you want to interact with me – and you just dont, and then you feel guilty about it and you freak out because you cant compartmentalise guilt, you just freak out and get angry whenever you feel guilt, because you never learned to cope with the full set of human emotions-”

“I WOULD LOVE TO RECOMMEND YOU TO MY THERAPIST!”, he screamed.

Meanwhile, his therapist was sitting at home, reading Andy’s blog.