Trust me, I'm full of crap.

I was just reading over the post I started a few weeks ago but only posted a couple of nights ago. (it's My Best Friend, a few posts down.) I was thinking about how everything I wrote of that experience was real to me. And how disingenuous and patronizing it would have sounded from my friend's perspective. Who do I think I am? Talking about saving her as if she had needed saving from me. As if I hadn't been the one who needed saving, but it was at the same time those feelings were real to me, I wasn't making them up. And if I look from her perspective it hurts me - I was probably much more attached to her than she was to me, and she let me hang around, and feel cool, and use her as a convenient vehicle for my own self motivated self destruction. See, ouch, that's not as fun.

I've been thinking a lot about skewed perspective lately. I've had a few people share their own memories that have included me in forums like this and I have been surprised by the things that were mentioned and the things that were omitted. It's not fun, it kind of hurts, it's often the truth, but the least generous truth.

This sort of thing is happening everywhere it seems. I have been listening to the radio and noticing a disproportionate amount of kiss off songs - You'll Think of Me when you think of The Best Days of Your Life and I hope it Gives You Hell so take your cat and your freedom and move it to the left to the left, with everything you own in a box to the left. I can't help wondering, if given the opportunity, what the other party would have written about them. Maybe their song would have been entitled The Fact That you Wrote a Screw You Song Just Illustrates That the Problems We had Were Not All On Me. It's a little wordy, it probably wouldn't have as much of an audience, since we all love that righteous indignation, but I kind of like it.

I read the Glass Castle last year, and from my own experience with, let's say, a slightly unorthodox upbringing, I was curious about how much of that book would have been verified by other parties present. After Naomi Judd wrote her book, Love Can Build a Bridge, in which she exonerates a lot of her own questionable behavior as the choices of a woman who had no choices, her daughter Winona was quoted as saying " some day I think I'll write a book, I'll call it "The Truth".

Now, writing a screw you song is a little different, I think, than my post about my best friend who will always have a reserved parking space in my heart, but when recounting any personal experience the implied my intentions were always pure and I may not be perfect, because that would be annoying, but I'm pretty close is a special gift that we almost always save to bestow upon ourselves.

So in summary, my intentions were always pure, and I'm not perfect, but I'm pretty close.