Life-loves

Posted February 11th, 2004 by Sean Williams

I’m not interested in trying to explain how you know when it’s right. For everyone it’s a different thing. I’m sure for a lot of women it’s that *this guy* hits them in the nose with a special sort of attention to detail that the other guys who’ve hit them in the nose don’t deliver.

And sure, I have actually thought it was right before. I’ve tethered this rickety ship to awesome gorgeous boats before, boats that wanted to go a different speed than I did, particularly when the water was dangerous.

But I feel right, right now, and I think I can explain why. The people that have agreed to surround me fulfill a specific set of requirements, and although it’s true for everyone, the best example is my friend Mac.

I really want to explain what Mac means to me, but it is almost as difficult as describing my relationship with my fiance. In a way, Mac and I entered into a three way marraige with our friend Steve 8 or 9 years ago. The kind of laughing that men do when they find their friends is incomparable. You guys out there, you have friends like this, the ones that make you laugh so hard that your cheeks hurt and your lungs burn.

It isn’t a joke that we make, there’s no phone catch-phrase. In fact, we’re terrible on the phone. It’s our lives. Mac and I have gotten to the point where our fondness for one another is so deep that we see our own suffering through the each other’s eyes, and that suffering becomes funny. If you heard us talking, nothing we said would seem to deserve how hard we are laughing.

There is a picture somewhere of Mac and I walking out of the ocean. He’s tall, skinny, white, I’m short, fat, covered in hair. We look like two different species. We usually make a great show of our differences. He’s neurotic, I’m explosive. He’s repressive, I’m aggressive. He’s a scholar, I’m a punk…

But the truth is, we are really really similar and we make a great show of our slight differences. We are actually both repressed, both manic learners but bad students, both more talented and shy than we are demanding and marketable. There is a brotherhood of humility and arrogance that I share with almost all my friends, but Mac and I are the embodiment of it.

A week or so ago, I found out I lost a job that could have changed my life. When these things happen to me, I tend to think of them as reasonable. But every time something bad happens to one of my friends, I’m not just sad for them, I’m disappointed in the world. And when disappointments happen to my closest friends, I just get incensed. The world will recognize what it’s being given, I know that, and I will just continue to push forward until it does.