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et-pugnator · 4 years

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On Friends

I think I’ve always placed an unusual importance in my friendships. I’m unsure why I have this tendency. I like to think I’m openhearted by nature, but it may have to do with the fact that I was not raised in a safe or loving home environment. This lack of kindred growing up has always made me feel that the life in my heart was a separate life, a different blood; without relationship to others.

I have three friends that I have grown up with and consider my best friends. (I will refer to them by their initials.) K, who is easily my most intelligent and level-headed friend. N, who I can speak the most freely with. R, who I am the closest with and whose temperament most resembles mine. K is cripplingly asocial, but the times when R, N, and I are together are the best of my life. Our hyperactive states feed off of each others’ like some self-sustaining power-source and our energy levels soar to what I’d imagine is close to the heavens. There’s a sense of love (for life and for each other) and “anything goes” and uncontrollable jokey-ness that create for the most uninhibitedly happiest moments on Earth. The memories of our ventures bolster me on in practically every other moment alive.

When I think of my friends, I sometimes get flashes of how they were when we were children; they sometimes appear that way in my dreams. Little boys with grass-stained knees, their hair stuck to their foreheads with sweat, crooked-toothed smiles. We played a lot in the woods, at the creek, or in the street. We particularly enjoyed hide-and-seek tag (“manhunt”), where we pretended it was the apocalypse and we were hunting each other in a war over turf. We’d “patrol” the town on bikes—we still do, mainly at night. We’d have Fight Club, also a standing tradition, where we’d wrestle each other.

These days (before this coronavirus, at least), a lot of our good times consist of screwing around in cars. Blasting obscene and sexually-offensive music, speeding, “car-surfing”, talking to strangers from our cars, burnouts. We’ve had cars for less than a year and have had at least eleven crashes. Lunchtimes at school and XC bus rides and sleepovers at R’s are always crackheadery prime. We often sneak out at night (unscrewing Nick’s entire window to do so) and go into the nearby city. We do social experiments in public just for laughs. We explore abandoned places and screw around in the woods and do/say stupid things at school that get us in trouble. We have a bit of a town-wide reputation for being rowdy.

Despite these times we’ve had together, our friendships are very imperfect. N has a selfishness about him, and has rape allegations against him and I’m unsure if I believe his side of the story or not. The allegations flipped our worlds, but we ultimately decided N shows every sign of becoming a better person in the future. R is histrionic by nature and has a habit of emotional manipulation and undue violence and cruelty. This past year has been riddled with nasty fights. I don’t think R, N, or K truly know me on a personal level—they know the part of me that knows how to have fun and laugh, but I feel they’re strangers to what my aims are in life; my worldview; my struggles; my inner life.

Though I call the boys my best friends, the friend who has really been the best to me is a 46 year old man (a professor) I met off of a writing website when I was 14. He was my guide in literature, philosophy, and finding my way to adulthood. I’d likely not be alive if not for him. He is the closest thing I’ve had to family and he knows me like nobody knows me. An imperfection in our relationship is that he often lacks the time and energy to speak to me and our interactions are increasingly rare. I spend a lot of time missing him. He “forgets” to pick up the phone for me and ignores a lot of my messages, and I can’t help but wonder if I mean much to him.

I also have a few friends exclusive to the internet. These friendships can be very fulfilling and caring in a way that is unique to friends who learn each other’s fundamental personalties before escalating to casualness: usually the opposite of the way it works in-person; friendships built entirely on the desire to talk with one another. But they know only the side of me that can be verbalized.

I worry a lot about my ability to make genuine friends in college. I have never made a truly dependable friend. I don’t think anyone counts me as a loved-one. I am at risk of homelessness after I leave home and I don’t know if I’m capable of making the life-or-death kind of friends that I need. I’ll have nobody to be with on the holidays. I suffer from a searing, soul-consuming loneliness on a daily basis that is the main source of pain in my life. I do not think I’m particularly likable (or lovable, at least), and I have a sinking fear that I will be entirely alone in that city.

#friends

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et-pugnator · 4 years

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On Intelligence

Despite my often-rude levels of free-spokenness, there are a number of facets of my inmost mind that I feel are relatively unexposed to anyone at all because I am certain they will be dismissed—whether because of pity or disgust or envy or simple foreignness.

My own opinion on the state of my intelligence is among those areas of myself that I’ve given up attempting to speak about to anyone at all. There is an understandable societal resistance to the acceptance of struggles related to intelligence; “I’m too smart” is laced with the same egoism perceived in a statement like “Having an abnormally large cock/breasts is so difficult.”

Regardless, I do not think I’m particularly intelligent; at least not nearly as much as I’m branded to be by those who know me. I do think I have a certain aptitude with words. I won spelling bees as a kid and retain linguistic knowledge fairly well. I’m well-read for my age. I can be expressive in my writing and I can be a good conversationalist, and I do think I’m a quite intuitive person in terms of understanding others. All of this gives the appearance of an intelligent person.

But I’m dull-witted and slow to notice patterns. I’ve had a lifelong tendency to transpose numbers that is so severe that a mastery of higher-level mathematics is probably unachievable to me. I’m the type of gullible that seems incapable of learning and is easily made a fool of, prone to being the butt of (often-cruel) jokes (and I’m often unaware until months later). I’ll be going to an esteemed university soon—one that will leave me with an amount of debt I may be unable to repay in my lifetime—and I worry about my ability to succeed.

I feel that it is my worldview that makes me feel estranged from my peers, not my intelligence. I love conversation and live among peers who are prone to a certain laconism—one which I think may be generational (I cannot know for sure, as I’m too young to have known another time period), caused by the age of the internet and forms of media that cater to short attention spans instead of the concentration required for a deeper understanding; a problem with postmodernism (or perhaps post-postmodernism? A lot of what I’ve seen thus far on Tumblr embodies the problem, actually.)

Conversations with peers often feel to me like—for lack of a better comparison—sex in which I was doing most of the work, and the other person got off and I didn’t, but the other person thinks I did and we lie together in bed while they drift to sleep contented and glad to have contented me, meanwhile I’m thinking of heading to the bathroom to get myself off. (I wouldn’t actually know, as my V-card remains in my possession.) For the most part, I feel that only literature and philosophical works really “get me off”, but also that it is a lack of compatible friends that is the cause for my intellectual anorgasmia. TL;DR — I wish my peers would express and examine themselves more, and not just through meme canon. And I’m aware of the pomposity my wish may seem threaded with, which is the reason I have never dared to discuss it.

A hope I have for myself is that I will find voluble, penetrative (ha) friends at college.

#intelligence

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et-pugnator · 4 years

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On Violence

It follows me around. I’ve grown up in a very violent situation, I’ve had several violent interactions with my peers, the sport I plan to make headway in is violent, and I came dangerously close to enlisting in a violent career path (which I may actually come back to, after college).

My kickboxing debut—something I’ve looked forward to for years—was officially cancelled yesterday due to the coronavirus, and I’m surprised (startled, even) to find myself feeling relieved.

There are times I’m athirst for the turbulence of a fight—the adrenaline-forced feeling of being “fully present,” the false sense of invincibility, the catharsis of dealing blows and even taking them; there are times I want almost nothing more. But there are, lately, equally frequent times where I find myself so, so tired of this endless cycle of violence in which I’m caught. Sometimes someone will hit me, and instead of the (depending on the circumstances under which I was hit) thrillfulness or galvanizing anger that I used to feel in response, I feel genuinely wounded, on an inner sense. There are thoughts like “Why am I in this situation again?”; “Why is it that I’m always being hit, and hitting others?” that come to me, whether it be during mere sparring with a partner or if someone is angry with me. There are times I can hardly bring myself to deal blows back, regardless of the circumstance—as if every fight (of every sort) that I’ve been through in my life were all rounds of the same fight, and I’m nearing either my KO point or a collapse from exhaustion (I can’t tell which).

I finally have a ticket out of hell—out of the little violent circle which is the only thing I’ve ever known: I’ll be going to college. I chose it over the Army’s Infantry at the last second. Given that the coronavirus doesn’t delay it, I’ll be leaving in August. I’ll be living in the cultural mecca of a world in rapid cultural decline, I’ll be living in a city for the first time in my life, I’ll be surrounded by art and people and life. But I’ll also be in the fighting center-point of the world, and I plan to try to climb. I redshirted my first year of Division 1 track and field mainly to find my way in the fighting world.

I can’t help but wonder why I’m doing this to myself again: picking another fight; leaving one hell to find another. Will I always be in the ring? From a violent upbringing to a foray into martial arts to a tenure in a combat career. This time in quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect, and I don’t know that—when the time comes—I’ll be able to get back in the ring.

Growing up, I always had a fascination with the morbid. “Darkling sensibilities,” as a friend of mine called it; a habit of seeing the skull under the face. The Punisher has been my lifelong favorite hero, and I’ve had preoccupations with the apocalypse and doomsday scenarios. My interests naturally gravitate that way, and it always unsettled me. But I have always been painfully empathetic. Paintings and words on a page and a good view of nature can bring me to tears. I put trust in strangers and have a terrible fondness for animals. Those two world-views duel within me (How can I be opposed to the death penalty, but have a partialty to vigilante justice?), but I think the latter one is winning out. My slight sadistic streak is dwindling. My love of humanity, I think, is prevailing.

All of that is why I think I might be an ex-pugnator — Latin for fighter/combatant.

I write all of this knowing that I’m prone to sudden changes in heart on this issue. Tomorrow I might be itching to fight again and contacting trainers. I’ll see what the rest of quarantine brings.

#violence

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