I've been watching tapes of Live Aid (July 13 1985 for the uninitiated) and saw, during Eric Clapton's set, a bit of an epiphany. I'm watching Clapton's current drummer, in tandem with Phil Collins, and am thinking "wow that guy is on so much blow...". Sure enough I correctly guessed it was Jeff Porcaro, a heavy user who died in 1992 from a "reaction" to toxic gardening chemicals but clearly had a weakened heart. Upon confirming the identity of this shaky, over-excited lad with sunglasses, I had nothing but anger and resentment for someone so talented wasting themselves in such a pathetic way.
While hard to write publicly, it's most cleansing to write of my realization why I lost all my friends and/or supporters during ridiculous periods of substance abuse and mental instability. I need not wonder why I, these days, write to the open sky that is the internet, textually shouting the epiphanies therein, with nobody left to receive them or acknowledge them. The circumstances that shroud such hindsight are not hard to understand, but I do wish I had my friends back in my corner; they ran away and certainly should have done so. But lest we forget that a vast majority of the human populace are, unfortunately, victims. As a reformed, loving, caring individual whose phone no longer rings on Friday, I can only ask those that might be hurting their beloved with weakness - don't allow the weakness to breakdown the rarest of all treasures one might find - close friends and caring people. They will support you but not unconditionally.
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Death Letter
14 years ago
3 comments:
When offered a chance by people who really did care. You're a no show. Good one !!
Very well said. Several quotes come to mind, though:
"Real friendship is shown in times of trouble; prosperity is full of friends."
(Euripedes)
"We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits."
(Maugham)
And most of all...
"In times of prosperity friends will be plenty; in time of adversity not one in twenty."
When you were/are in self your destruct mode and refused to see beyond your immediate and mostly self imposed implosion. Despite dozens of attempts in at first gentle and later less than gentle methods to get you to open your eyes, your replies were consistantly dishonest and spiteful. You even resorted to stabbing people in the back.
What else could you possibly expect?
Those are some nice quotes you have regurgitated there. True too.
However, no friend not even family, will will follow you on suicidal? path to the point they are causing themselves the same or greater harm than you are creating for yourself.
You seem to expect your friends to take that plunge with you and you are incorrectly judging them for stepping out of the path of a un-necessary slow motion trainwreck.
If your demise were not of your own efforts, (intention has come into question), you happen to know a few people who would risk their own lives on your behalf.
After numerous forays into your world of self defeat and without doubt absolutely ridiculous choices, in real attempts to bring you back before you caused yourself serious social, emotional and perhaps physical harm, your rebuttals of thanks, but no thanks caused people to back off with the proverbial "well, if you insist".
In the past you have been screwed over and so has 99.99% of the rest of the people on the planet.
The question is, have you learned anything from it?
Nobody CAN help you if you refuse to help yourself.
You have talents that are extraordinary and you still have time to do do just about anything you want to do. Add to that, the FACT the you are a GOOD person.
Get back to the basics. Understand that there are people out there who still care about you but they will not take that headlong plunge with you for they clearly see that the end of that plunge is an unecessary self terminating splat or... insanity.
Would you willingly ride with a friend who's racing at top speed towards a concrete wall when all previous attempts to divert them have not succeeded?
Get Real.
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