A boys' night out
This week I rung up an old friend, mostly in effort to excise myself from depression-created isolationism. I asked him out for a drink, and as he happened to have a small flu and thus relieved of his usual spare time duties, he agreed.
All in all, it was pleasant to spend time with him. Due to my alcoholism-abused liver and his athletic yet migraine-drug-riddled physique, he drank himself into a semi-stupor rather rapidly. This created the somewhat interesting scene whereupon he laid himself bare before my yet-somewhat-analytical observation.
It was wholesale curious to deconstruct someone I've genuinely loved from the detached perspective of a couple years' separation. The frank admission of infidelity towards the woman he purports to love, for absolutely physical reasons, yet reasons I knowing him can relate to and understand. How someone I once held as bed-rock today struggles with what to do with his life as I've finally found direction.
None of this I said to him, of course, I simply listened as a friend does. Not to belittle, of course, as his troubles are continuation of those we shared years ago, just as mine are. I did learn enough of him to know and comprehend the reasons for his self-doubts today. I fear he knows me enough to comprehend mine, but we didn't really touch that.
What was interesting, however, was hearing his perspective of our shared experiences through the lens of retrospection. What he had learned, or gained, from all of our shared time. All that sex, all those women, all of the broken taboos and unrestrained behaviour.
I think the most striking thing, for me, was his perception of motive. Why had we pursued all those things we did, why we forsook what society calls morals. As he put it, the things we experienced together he can never share with others, even through anecdote, as they "cannot understand and will always moralize". And he is right. In my pursuit of meaning, pleasure and direction, he was swept along, though it is unfair to paint myself the sole driver there. Either way, we ended up in so many titillating situations, and it seems our interpretation of the reasons leading up to it differ fundamentally.
My nihilism and the constant tug-of-war between self-loathing and desire rendered me in a truly uncaring situation. It did not matter in the slightest what I did, as there were no morals to live up to save those I chose in my head, and by that point I cared very little of myself and my morals. Do-as-you-please was an easy option to adopt as there was no greater authority but myself. It truly did not make a difference which path I chose, which actions I took, as the end was always the same. Solitude and death.
Then, I detested life, was prepared to risk all and behave outrageously for I cared not. There was only the shame inside my head, and that I drowned with alcohol and women.
Whereas he! He loved life, loves it. He was the true hedonist to my vowed nihilist; he went along and engaged in all that debauchery because he only lives once, and he wants to enjoy as much of it as possible. In my self-destruction I helped him attain many pleasures of the mind and body few experience. As he explained his infidelities, I remembered and understood then what drove him in the past, his own desire.
This is a paradox I find most satisfying, and not simply because I was a participant. It is telling of the human condition that we were able to give one another so much despite our differing drives. We have a relationship we can't ever have with any other, and it was also delightful for me that we were so easily able to rekindle it, to relate all those we hold secret from the world.
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Originally Posted by Nessus
