It’s been almost a year without Andy in my life and I can’t say I miss him. This doesn’t mean I hate him or wish bad things upon him or that I think he’s a bad person. We definitely had our share of fun, funny and interesting moments. I’ll always giggle when certain things come to mind, and if he suddenly showed up homeless on my doorstep, of course I wouldn’t have the heart to turn him away.

We just simply grew to be way too different over the years. His ignorance, arrogance and stupidity really got to me. Normally I don’t give a shit who might have these little false truths in mind that they believed about me, as there is a difference between a belief in fact, but aren’t our friends supposed to be able to take us for face value?

Did he know me better than most people? Absolutely. But sometimes we’re wrong about the people we know well, and we don’t know every single thing there is to know about them. People change and you can’t always assume they’re going to handle something a certain way based on their past actions. I mean, when he was a kid in school he ignored bullies. Today he’d fight back. Now if something like watching TV got in the way of my writing then I might very well reconsider watching TV.

I just got so tired of being judged and compared to others as well as himself constantly. If I disagreed with him it was because I was “being just like my mother,” rather than an individual who simply happened not to agree with him.

If he was jealous of someone who was young and skinny, then it was automatically assumed that I was too, and that there was no way anybody else was going to be comfortable with who/what they were, even if they knew they weren’t perfect, as long as he wasn’t comfortable with his own self. Everybody was expected to have the same insecurities he had. That’s just the way he was. He didn’t seem to care if others could relate to his positive traits and experiences, but any negative ones were automatically assumed to be mutual. Like he got off on the idea of others being miserable right along with him, not that he was always miserable. But he seemed to be down in some way a lot of the time.

I also didn’t care for his two-wrongs-make-a-right attitude. “It’s about time whites got to feel how blacks once felt,” he once said.

I remember shaking my head sadly, embarrassed for him, the day he said this. Did he ever listen to himself? Did he ever hear the stupidity and senselessness in many of his words? You might as well tell every woman who hasn’t been raped that it’s about time she finds out what those who have been raped feel like, right?

It was weird, though, because he could be as compassionate as he was lacking in empathy. He bought coats for the homeless, and he sent me cheesecake when I was going through the side effects in conjunction with the perimenopause… but Robin Williams threw it all away just for shits and giggles?

Now let’s talk about the selfishness – yes he did apologize for not even making it out of the parking lot of the train station when we picked him up yet already he’d mentioned God, and yes he did apologize for being stingy with the gum after we spent enough money on him – but why was it that I was always quick to ask him how his doctors appointments when more often than not he wouldn’t ask me shit? He would eventually read about it in my journals, but was that really the same thing? Especially if you’re going to read about an appointment 6 months after the fact?

The hypocrisy was like OMG at times. How can you pat yourself on the back for being what you believe is unique, but then you seem to want to go out of your way to fit into the so-called norms? In one breath he would bash those that bash blacks and gays, but then he would turn around and judge my husband who never did a damn thing to him in his life. He would judge his lifestyle and preferred way of living, despite the fact that it works just fine for him and he’s happy. AND Andy’s the same loner he is. The only difference is that with Tom it’s by choice. With Andy, it’s because he can’t make friends or keep them for very long when he does.

He once said that when we were younger, other gays didn’t like us. In hindsight, I can see that that’s only half true. I can’t speak for him, but for me, the issue was more that back then I was just so damn picky than that there was nobody that wanted me. These days, however, I’m not solely attracted to ultra-feminine women. I’ve actually come to like them in the middle and I’ve actually preferred that since around the new millennium. I realize that a lot of women that were interested in me back in the pre-Tom days that I wasn’t attracted to; I would now probably consider them attractive or at least acceptable. Honestly, I doubt I would be attracted to Stacey 20 years ago. These days she’s totally my type. The only thing she doesn’t have that I normally go for is height. She’s a brilliant psychologist with a brilliant and compassionate mind. She has a great body, warm brown eyes and a sexy smile, though I can see where most people may consider her face rather average-looking. And her shoulder-length brown hair.

I appreciate that he apologized for some of the judgmental, cruel and false things he said about both myself and my husband. But no matter how sincerely we may apologize that doesn’t take back, erase or undo what was said and the hurt that was caused by those words. People may forgive but they don’t forget. Not until selective amnesia is a real possibility.

As for his constant forgetfulness and being slow to grasp some things, I think that was for a variety of reasons. I understand that the pot damaged brain cells along the way. I get that. And he may not be the brightest person on earth naturally, but he wasn’t the dumbest either and I think that he would sometimes play dumb/slow just to mess with and frustrate people. Again, I know we can’t always judge people in the present by how they were in the past, but as even he admitted, he sometimes liked to annoy and mindfuck people. The more I would let him know that his constant obsession/chatter with celebrities and food, for example, was annoying, the more he would “happen” to mention these topics. The more I would dislike a particular picture, the more I would see it on his old Ask wall before that site went to hell. The more I would have preferred not to hear about God, the more I would.

I would never want anyone to try to change or control me, but when someone I supposedly care about lets me know something I’m overdoing something and being annoying, I do try to curb it within reason. I get, however, that if you literally are obsessed/addicted to something it’s not easy to choke it back any more than it’s easy to quit smoking. Food, celebrities and young men were what made his world go around, you could say. LOL

Another thing I don’t miss is the blatant lack of sensitivity. His insisting Robin Williams “threw it all away” is not only a sheer display of utter ignorance but also an ultimate display of stupidity. Any idiot with half a brain would have common sense enough to know that no one’s so damn happy that they up and decide to say WTF one day and throw it all away. It’s a mental illness! Various medical conditions, illnesses, injuries and medications can affect anyone emotionally at any time, and if you think you’re invisible and that it’s all a matter of choice, you’re a real fucktard IMO. Seriously, I hope the guy didn’t take the cooking class he once said he considered. That’d not only feed his obsession with food (pardon the pun), but I think a psychology class would be more beneficial to him. In the end, it’s his life and his decision. I’m just sure that most experts would agree that not all suicidal people can be saved just like not all cancer patients can be saved.

As they say, you can’t change people and make them who/what you want them to be, and I wouldn’t want to any more than I would want someone doing that to me. Therefore I am glad I can just avoid these types of idiots instead. We were just too damn different in the end as I said. He’s sure there’s a God and that things happen for a reason and are destined to play out the way they do. I believe there probably isn’t a God and things are just random. There’s just too much diversity in people’s lives. If there were a sense of order and sameness for all of us, then it would seem planned and designed to be that way. But sometimes the innocent baby dies of cancer while the murderer wins the lottery. My sister’s a die-hard fan/believer of God yet she had a heart attack and a million other health issues this year. I’m agnostic and 95% of 2016 has been great. Sorry, but I don’t see the “grand plan” in that. But you know what? It’s ok to disagree. It’s when we go into judgmental, critical, control-freak mode that I have a problem with. Sometimes you’re wrong and sometimes I’m wrong, too. Nobody knows it all.

He once said he prayed for Comcast to be late with a repair job so he’d get something like $20, and they were late and he did get the money. Well, guess what? They were late with us too, we didn’t pray, yet we still got the money, too. Go figure. I still say it comes down to fate and not what we pray for. If prayer actually worked, we could ask for anything we wanted. I just don’t know if there’s something up there deciding on what we get/don’t get, or if it’s happenstance, but I’m leaning with chance based on the random diversity I pointed out in which no obvious pattern is present. So… Life is going to play itself out whether I prefer it to play out a certain way or not. That’s just been my own personal experience and observation.

What it came down to with Andy was not only the things I just mentioned but his negativity as well. I realized that in his mind he was just being honest, and it isn’t that I don’t appreciate the truth, but there’s a time to be honest and there’s a time to just accept and be happy for people. When you focus on nothing but the negative possibilities and aspects of things, people find you both annoying and depressing, almost as if you don’t want them to be happy.

Lastly, the immaturity got frustrating. We’re all young at heart in various ways. I mean look at me with my rainbow teddy bear. But again, too much is too much IMO, and oftentimes I felt like I was talking to a teenager.

So do I want to resume our friendship now that a year has passed? No, I don’t, and I don’t think he does either. I hope not for his sake. But I do wish him the very best.

Later…

Waved hello to Geri as I was out front watering the cactus that we plan to move into a bigger pot. It’s a large clay pot that was left here by the last owners.

We’re planning to finally do the floors next month. I’ve got a design in mind for the kitchen and one in mind for the laundry/bathroom area. Andy was the smarter one when it came to that. Yes, that’s the one thing he definitely got right that we didn’t… leaving only the bedrooms carpeted. Well, I’ll consider this the practice house. The next house will only have carpet in the bedrooms, all the walls will be white so no wall hangings clash with the colored walls, the place will be less busy so it’s less circus-like, and wooden blinds will be in the windows instead of these traditional blinds. Wooden blinds have a stick where you can open and close them in a split-second. With regular blinds, you have to keep winding and winding the stupid wand. Wooden blinds will also be sturdier whereas these are flimsy.

I was so glad to learn that they canceled Oktoberfest on Sunday, which the rain had prevented last month! I’m just amazed because I don’t usually get that lucky. One less thing to have to deal with.

It’s also been surprisingly quiet these last couple of days as far as motorcycles go. Didn’t hear the really loud car stereo tonight, but it might have blasted around when I was under the headphones.

I can’t believe how lucky we got with the new neighbors and how quiet next door has been for over a year now. This is a totally well-deserved compensation for the years we had to put up with one bad neighbor after another who just couldn’t shut up. To this day I have to ask myself… how did I not end up snapping and totally losing it on one of them? Everybody has their breaking point and we can only be pushed so far for so long. I’m just glad we escaped it before I could finally snap, storm over to them in the heat of the moment, and do who knows what.

The people next to the “Twenties” have red and green projection Christmas lights dancing across the front of their place and it looks really cool. Still think it’s way too early for that kind of thing, but that’s just how this country is… instead of waiting till it’s a few weeks away from an event, they start celebrating a few months in advance. It’s silly and annoying but I guess it’s harmless.

I was laughing at a couple of things I read. One said that you’re partly bigoted if you even so much as notice that somebody you may pass in the store or something like that is black. Oh, come on. How can you not notice any more than you can not notice if they’re white? Take Alyssa, for example, who just married black guy. Does anyone who knows her really think she’s unaware of the fact that Donte is black and consider her part racist? So… sorry but I gotta disagree with this one.

Then there’s the issue of what’s judgmental and what’s not. It’s human nature to form opinions on various things the instant we hear and see things throughout life. We do it subconsciously without even realizing it. It’s like that saying… opinions are like assholes, everybody’s got them. So I don’t think it makes us judgmental in a bad way because we may mentally decide that the woman at the bank wore a very pretty shirt while the guy down the street painted his house an ugly color. I think we only become judgmental in a bad way when we criticize others for being who/what they are and trying to force them to conform to what we think is right.