The Wind's at My Back - the Blowhards of Bull Sessions Past

Going back to the theme of "Never mistake a drinking buddy for a friend," I remember all too well the painful conversations he and I so often fell into -- either drunk or suffering with hangovers. Being in one's "right mind" was absolutely not a prerequisite to these drone sessions.

For whatever reason, this drinking buddy was morbidly into "proving" that human life wasn't worth a shit. Or, had any of us lived during more heinous, turbulent moments in history (though the current one is pretty hard to beat on that score) we would have been conquistadors, Nazis, or torturers at Abu Ghraib -- because in that git's groping mind our inability to time-travel made it impossible to conclusively prove we wouldn't have been barbarians in another time.

To my shame, I sat through these dull, windy dissertations. Worse, I actually attempted arguments to the contrary. Christ, just feeding the fire.

During a time when I was reading about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the drinking buddy informed me that no single human life was of particular significance. Even that of a president. The conversation is somewhat hazy to me now, but I do recall bringing up the idea that surely someone like Jonas Salk or Albert Einstein were not insignificant (Jesus Murphy, if only I had been content to speak my thoughts plainly: no human life is insignificant!). Oh, how I misjudged the drinking buddy's infatuation with his pet theories. He explained that Salk and Einstein were entirely insignificant because it would only have been a matter of time before someone else made the discoveries attributed to these men.

Rest assured, the former drinking buddy does not work for a suicide hot-line. He could take the gem out of Gidget's donut.

My punishment for being unable to extricate myself from these wretched ramblings was having to sit through the myriad variations of "If you lived in Germany in the 1930s, there's no conclusive way you can prove you wouldn't have been a Nazi." Or, an Egyptian slave-driver, or a blood-thirty Inquisitor, or a village-burning grunt during the Vietnam War. Or, whatever.

When I think of the waste of mind behind such pointless, negative, shit-begotten theories, I again rouge-over with embarrassment at the thought that I sat through thirty seconds of such talk. But I did. O, me.

Well, hindsight and hindthought are upon me. I have finally extricated myself from the rubber-room of the ex-drinking-buddy's bilious theories and arguments.

The only satisfaction I have in retrospect is that, for some reason, the old drinking buddy never forgot an off-hand remark I once made about his cats being very narrowly removed from vermin. If he only knew that I am now the proud property of a cat, for whom I would give a kidney or an eye or a portion of my battered liver to keep her scampering through the house. She is a true friend.