Lies, tears, then anger.

I don't often get angry, but when I know I have good reason to it's rather easy.

But anger is never first - at first I'm just sad. I'm happy about that because I think it's proper to mourn an injustice before having the anger to rectify it.

I'm angry, world, and I don't care who knows it. I've been forgotten about, discarded, ostracized, disrespected, and now...lied to. Lies, damn lies, are something I have a terrible time forgiving. There is no worse thing to treat me with than deception. Especially when that deception concerns something so close to my heart.

I think one of the wisest quotes from the Dark Tower is from one of the villains. "Only enemies tell the truth...friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard." I don't know who my friend is trying to gain regard from, but it's certainly not me.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for honesty.

On insincerity.

People need to figure out what a lie is.

A lie is intentionally saying something false. A lie is making promises you can't - or won't - keep. A lie is saying something you don't mean.

I get a lot of lies from people who really mean well. But they're really not doing well at all. Consider someone who says something nice but doesn't mean it at all - where does that leave the person receiving that lie? It is only delaying the day when they finally say "Well, I guess that person never meant what they said at all." Which hurts more than just saying the harsh truth up front.

I can finally admit that I am not well-liked by the majority of people. That's it, that's the bare facts. I hardly care anymore. How do I know this? It comes in actions, not words. At the end of the day, people can say all kinds of nice things to me and having nothing to back it up. I like that they don't want to hurt my feelings by telling me they find me absolutely boring and uninteresting, but if I'm boring and uninteresting, I really don't mind knowing, rather than having to figure it out for myself.

Really, the people who are reading this blog right now hardly need told any of this, and I anticipate that this little rant is going to cost me a sit-down with one of my few true friends. Thank you, but no! You should know I mean none of you. It is the others from whom I hear a lot of nicey-nice talk but demonstrate constantly their insincerity.

I'm a grown man now. I'm really not demonstrating that very well right now, writing a rant on the Internet like a teenager and all, but if people understood this is the only real platform I am allowed unlimited expression of my feelings where they can be "heard" maybe I can be allowed a little indulgence. Still, I am a grown man. I can handle someone telling me they'd rather not be my friend. That doesn't hurt me as much as it hurts to be led to believe I have many friends, when in reality I do not.

I want true friendships, virtuous friendships, sincere and involved friendships. I don't want to hear from people that I am something to them I am not. The reality of that grievous lie comes out the first time I see them again, when people are around and they can't even look me in the eye and say "hello." That doesn't sound like friendship at all to me. Oh no.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for sincerity.

"You go on."

"Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on."

The frank, bitter, but thankfully (and finally) truthful comments of a friend(?) have led me to question my writing of this blog. What real purpose does it serve? I am quite sure I don't know, and don't really want to know. Yes, I do write of my feelings and share them on the Internet, of all places. The real question is, is it the right thing to do to write these posts? I am not positive I have any way of knowing that right now, and quite frankly I suspect it doesn't really matter whether I do or do not. The content matters.

So the content of this post is about going on. Really, I have settled into a sort of complacency with my place in life right now. Ultimately, it is a healthy, spiritual complacency. Deep down, though, I feel I miss some of the romanticism I used to espouse, however unhealthily I managed it. Life was more exciting when I let myself have expectations. Now that I have none, it seems that I just go on.

I'm not saying this is such a bad thing, considering that how things turned out when I let myself get excited about things that were ultimately not guaranteed and even improbable. There's nothing wrong with getting a little romantic about the future, so long as it doesn't get in the way of you doing the right thing in the present moment. I think that was my problem, all along. I've solved the problem by destroying the romanticism, not by just centering myself on the present.

As I write this, I suspect maybe I'm going too far. I feel as though I do have a reasonable amount of hope for happy endings in my future, but it's not quite the same flavor as the experiences I used to have in less sane times of my life. For now though, I'll leave my musing at that.

What is really pressing on my mind at the moment is friendship. I have spent so great a deal of time on this topic in the past four years or so that I am not sure what else I can say about it, but this: that I am now quite sure that friendships are not chosen, but born. They live and die, they can become sick or strong. I really wish I had come to this conclusion in another way, but recent experiences prove this fact to me, and I suppose I should be grateful.

Some friendships...well, they just go on too. So many of my own are going on in a way that makes me wonder whether I really have any at all. Why would I say such a thing, you might ask. Well, I feel as though there is really only one person in this world who knows who I really am. And I recently found out someone I trusted has secretly harbored an animosity of sorts to knowing who I really am. A repulsion, perhaps, is a more accurate term. No matter how I describe it, of course, this person would deny it. But I hear through double-speak, and it doesn't fool me.

I must say I know he was right on one account: I was a hypocrite...on one occasion. I complained that it sometimes bothers me that no one seems to really want to ask me about myself, and most of the time now when I spend time with people they dominate the conversation. I clarified that most of the time I don't mind - because I truly want to know people better. Well, I screwed up by doing that exact thing to him. However, that doesn't erase the fact I really would have liked to gotten to know him better...and really, that one time...that one time...I really needed someone to listen to me.

I don't want my friendships to stagnate. Now I have made both mistakes - I have been all the way the dominant person, and now I have been the submissive listener too. I want friendships where both people get to know each other better...not a friendship that stagnates. I want friendships that are honest - not like the friend mentioned who would have made me guess to the uttermost end that all along he was unhappy with me, instead of telling me.

I am certainly more grateful now for the friendships I have that I have clearly not chosen...because those are becoming my best friendships...to those friends reading, you know who you are.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for full, exciting friendships.

Preoccupations and lies.

Again, many things have changed emotionally since my last post.

I'm fine now. In fact, I started to get a lot better only shortly after my last post. Why? Honestly, I think it was all the video games. Video games, for reasons I can't explain, seem to numb all my social senses, including loneliness. I should probably elaborate, but that's a subject for another post.

Lately I've noticed that my thoughts haven't been moving from one thing to another as I would like but recurring over the same thoughts over and over. It's become more of a preoccupation rather than a "thought stream" if you will. Mostly, I seem to be preoccupied with thoughts of my family, and a person.

A conversation with a friend today led me to understand that I do hide things from time to time. I typically characterize myself as someone who is very open and honest, but during conversation with this friend I realized that I was hiding something - for a good reason, and I was quick to explain why I had to not reveal something. Still, I couldn't help but notice that I almost didn't catch that was what I was doing...I was so sure that I was an open person that I didn't realize I actually don't share everything...just most things. Anything that is convenient for me to share, I do. And that is the vast majority of things I want to share...but I do have secrets. And I also have things that I shouldn't share, because they would damage myself or another person, or can't, because they are other people's secrets...but I digress.

This knowledge of my preoccupations coupled with my realization about my secrets led me to think about lying.  Lying, I believe, is less about making up a convincing story or creating something that isn't true but more about concealing what is true. When you lie your goal is not to create a fine tale but to do whatever possible to hide the truth. Should you tell a lie, you care less about what they believe so long as it's not the truth that you seek to hide. For instance, you don't care if your parents believe the dog knocked over the lamp or the tooth fairy, so long as they don't know it is you who actually broke the lamp.

Well, I sometimes forget about this, but I'm a really good liar. You kind of need to be a good liar to even hope to be a counselor...not because you lie to your patients (never, ever) but because sometimes you must conceal a truth that would be harmful for your client to hear (such as, you not liking them). I used to lie a lot, before following God a little more closely. At one time I was so good at it, I hid something very obvious for an entire summer without getting caught.

These days there is not much use for that skill, besides keeping a poker face from time to time and "picking my battles" when I would really like to say a truth that the world is not quite ready for.

Getting back to preoccupations, in a roundabout way (as you can see by the lengthy explanation above) I discovered that even though I can lie/conceal truth to other people I simply cannot do so to myself. My preoccupations reveal something to me I do not wish to believe. What that is...I am concealing for now. Sorry, but it's not really all that important to this blog post anyway. What I mean to say is, I have tried to lie even to myself, but failed...and I doubt it will ever be possible to lie to myself without regressing to a less self-aware state.

Anyone who reads these posts will notice I am a holistic person. My solitary boast: I have done a really good job of learning about myself and how my mind works. That said, such self-knowledge has made it impossible for me to not know something about myself of which I'd rather remain unaware. Like I said, I've been preoccupied with my family and with a person. At this point, my actions on these thoughts are all up to me, but I cannot avoid what these preoccupations reveal to me about my feelings...revelations that would be more helpful if they were hidden...at least, at this point, I believe they would. Maybe I would be more susceptible to doing something stupid if they were there and I was unaware of them.

Time will tell.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for truth of thought.