Sunday, August 27, 2017

Belated High School Drama in Houston

GISHWHES was amazing, as usual, though even this morning I was reminded that I am kind of glad that this was the last big thing. I need these to be smaller more frequent events. That's what I am hoping for anyway.

In other and more current news, Hurricane Harvey (which downgraded and dissipated and disappeared, leaving flooding and off-shot tornadoes in its wake) struck the Gulf Coast region of Texas this week and I was reminded of 2011. Pretty strongly.

While I have lots of sympathy for those who lacked the means to evacuate and will be giving a fair sum of my Patreon money for the month to whatever charity in the affected areas I can find that accepts Paypal, I find my emotions turning in a less altruistic perspective.

In March of 2011, a friend from high school was taking a vacation with his then-boyfriend now-husband to Las Vegas. When news of the shit going down in the country where I'd been residing for several years at that point came to light and made international headlines, I do not know how he felt or what he did. All I do know is that he never contacted me. Not that weekend. Not the week after. At no point did he even give my potential destruction at the hands of something unfathomable more attention than a like on a facebook post. Literally. That is all he did. No comment. No message.

People I hadn't seen in over a decade were finding me on facebook and messaging me to see if I was okay. My mom's boyfriend sent me almost harassing emails, encouraging my communication with her as if I were some wayward teen and not a grown ass woman in an area that just lost all access to electricity and phone lines.

People I hardly knew were coming out of the woodwork to ask if I was okay or say they were happy to hear I hadn't died.

Yet an uncaring jackass with whom I shared my first non-familial home couldn't give me more than a thumbs up. I did hear that at some point he texted a mutual friend for news. Does anyone else get how weird that is as for communication? He did the same thing a few months later when he decided 2 weeks before my wedding that he no longer wanted to play to role of groomsman even though he had agreed to it 6 months previous. Again, he could not bring himself to contact me but instead whined at a mutual friend. Was this for hope of her brokering a better deal? No idea.

I came up with 2 answers for this scenario. Either he cared but was afraid to show me that he cared so he used the intermediary to be able to pretend to be aloof or he never cared in the first place and was using the intermediary to make sure our mutual friends still believed him to be something other than an unfeeling jackass. Option 1 is more likely I believe, even now, but kit doesn't matter. We're grown ass adults. If you need an intermediary to communicate with me, we aren't friends. We may never have been.

Well, the shoe is on the other foot now, Jeffery. Shit's going down in H-town and I've got to say, even now, 6 years after I blocked you from my Facebook and stopped having any kind of contact with you, I give more of a shit about your survival than you may have ever given about mine.

Because I'm fucking writing about it, even though I should really not even care. If anyone who knows him is reading this, know that I still hope he and his people are okay, though I know they all have connections to other folks further north. I do hope they got out okay.

Which is more than they ever said to me.

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