I don’t understand why I’m like this. I have a friend (actually several but let’s focus on this one) who is just plain stupid. Well, maybe he’s not stupid in the strictest sense, but he’s a very very very poor example of what a citizen should be. He disagrees with me politically which is part of the problem, maybe most of it, but he also does very little to understand problems of the world and so sticks to a point of view that keeps blinders to reality.

What I don’t get is why I still love the SOB and why I don’t just cut him off at the knees and tear him a new one.

I could. He’s pretty dumb as I say. I could rip his arguments up and berate his ass until he screamed bloody murder. Actually he has a few times, but with words like “Well, we have to agree to disagree,” which essentially means “I’ve lost but I don’t care because my stupid father told me I was worth the world and I haven’t allowed myself to see that his entire peer group hated him.” See I know what he doesn’t, that the entire world of his family thought his dad was an annoying moron and have felt sorry for him since then.

God, I’m a jerk.

Seriously, why do I care? I care because this kid is nice. He’s sweet and warm and has a great heart, but he’s completely brain-dead. If he had grown up in my world he would’ve been chewed up and spit out by sixth grade. If he’d gone to school with me instead of that hick state school he went to, he’d have been forced to shut up after the first six hours. There is just no way a person like him could survive save for living in a small protected, no-nothing enclave.

I see a lot of that actually. More now then ever before, though I have to admit I even saw some of it in college, mostly regarding attitudes towards homosexuality and sexuality in general. Immaturity gets a big head when it feels threatened.

Like me? Hmmm…

I get confused sometimes as to whether I’m trying to change the world or myself or whether I should be concentrating on the things I do or something completely different. I’m lost often in a limbo of “Is what I’m doing what I should be doing?” and “Is what I’m doing what I should want to be doing?” My God that’s inordinately trying, isn’t it? To have every second be made up of wondering if your very thoughts are the ones you should be having.

Yikes.

But my stupid friend has no such worries. He just goes along in his little cartoon universe of known knowns and tons and tons and tons of unknown knowns. He is happy I think as are others I know who share his lack of wanting to understand anything. I don’t envy them their idiocy, but I enjoy them in their innocence. I’m not sure that I miss the innocence myself, but I seem to love it. I’m attracted to and calmed by it. I didn’t have much of a chance to be innocent myself. I learned the hard way very young about the realities of life and relationships and issues of emotion, depth, caring, confusion and love. I still long for the simplicity I couldn’t have even though I recognize it as, well, simplicity, aka simplemindedness. I think indeed I long to have it around. Like a nice cat.

I should be a dictator.