Bramble Tamble

More self-indulgence until you are hammered into submission …

Every now and again (and this is one of the "nows"), I feel this pang in my gut because of all of the people I've screwed over in my life. I suppose that "screwed over" is the improper choice of words. Perhaps "tossed aside" or "grew apart from" is the more accurate terminology.

Thanks in part to my recent bad poetry postings and other minutiae that I won't bog you down in, I got to thinking today about friends past and friends lost.

I determined that, after all these years, I have approximately three friends – one's the Captain, as you might have guessed, one's in Iraq and one's a girl. Bubbling just below that top level is a category of acquaintances that I have – folks I'd definitely have multiple beers with if the opportunity arose (hi Jason!), and I'd like to think they'd be happy to do the same with me, but I've not exactly been busting my ass to make the opportunity arise.

Come to think of it, almost every relationship I've ever had – family, friends, romantic – has been tainted or, in some cases, destroyed by my abject laziness (I've detailed this previously). In the current Great Household Liquidation that has pulled me away from this blog and caused me to slip into "The Way We Was" mode, I found among the detritus of my past a birthday card I got for my 18th birthday from my now-former-stepdad. It was one of those cards that says how much you mean as a son to the sender. He hand-wrote on the inside, "You do mean as much to me as any son could be. Love and best wishes, John."

God.

If I hadn't had the dad I had – and my father is as close to Superman as I could ever have asked for in my life - John would have definitely been my second choice. He was as decent to me as he didn't have to be, to borrow a Brad Paisley lyric.

Of course, John and my mom divorced around the time that that card was sent to me, maybe even before that. (Sad that I can't even recall it, but my head was squarely in my ass at that point in my life.) And, of course, how often have I spoken with him in the last 14 years or so? Zero.

"But the phone and the mail service works both ways, Brandon. You can't blame yourself for your relationship with your former stepdad disintegrating like that."

To which I say, "Eat me." More politely, I can blame myself, and I do.

I really need to look him up.