You Need Me

First Posted 15-Jan-2015

So, I nicknamed somebody, “SumYung HotTea” to make a point. The character was a collage of folk I’ve known. I thought I was done with her. Not. It’s never good to try and go blow for blow with a writer who owns a domain. This is why: This medium, blogging, thrives on conflict and strife. Being an ass in this space draws attention. Attention draws page views and drives traffic. Traffic makes me money. So, there is no reason for me to be reasonable here. Sending me nominally private communications on Facebook is almost guaranteed to get you written about here. Odds improve greatly if you argue with me. This is my turf. It’s my sandbox. I get to be as much of an asshat as I want.

What prompted this? A note from SumYung HotTea that I need her. That actually, the things I said I didn’t value in her were things I should like about her. And the thing I thought was good was an attribute she didn’t care about. Right.

I need a dry drunk/addict lesbian with a huge idea that she’s good at things that are supposed to be hot. Good at sex? No. Good at house cleaning? No. I had to clean my house after she cleaned it. Good at . . . art? Music? Writing? Yeah, uhm, let me think . . . No. Can she cook? She cannot. Knows how to make Chinese tea? Not even. Hold a conversation? Sure, if you want to talk about drinking, getting high, lesbian sex, or Tupak and speak in monosyllabic slang punctuated with, “Feel me?” Feel her? Eew.

I’m running out of positives here. I need her for . . . what? I do have core beliefs. Bad or good, I have them. One of them is that for a relationship to work there has to be empathy. There has to be a sense that both parties would do self-sacrificial stuff for the other without hope of return. That it isn’t a barter, where there isn’t some sense of mercantile interest in the transaction. Not, “if you’ll take care of me I’ll do stuff for you.” Do what? Clean my house? Bump uglies? Feel her? Yeah, how about . . . no. Another belief is in humility, in selfless surrender to the relationship. I’ve become as healthy as I am, and I am far from healthy, because of a long string of sacrifices to God of the hurts, habits & hangups which have kept me from Him. Putting someone in my life who does not compromise, does not sacrifice anything to God or anyone else, would be painful. It’s so not hot.

I come from a family who does not compromise Our currency is long, intense, faux psychoanalytical conversations about what’s wrong with so and so. We believe that the world is messed up and we would be better off if it’d just stick to our orthodoxy. This next relates, work with me: my aunt asked my granddad, her father, why he never complimented the performance of my cousin. He replied that our family does not praise each other because it’d give us a swollen head. Maybe so, but a multi-generational diet of words about what’s wrong with us, with our family and the world, and a stipulation that the answer is to adhere to our orthodoxy, doesn’t set a course for healthy relationships.

My grandfather would not listen to any suggestion that you could puff & dry fruit without oil. He argued with us when we told him painting the interior of his contraption with lead paint made it useless for cooking fruit in oil in a vacuum that people would buy to eat. It’s part of our family insanity. More people like that, who have no room for me in their life unless I understand they are right? I’ll pass.

SumYung HotTea sends me a message and blow for blow, debates each of the elements of my message intending to set expectations. She tells me why my expectations, my hopes for the friendship need to be what she tells me they will be. Why? Why would I go back into a relationship where I have to fight for simple basics like empathy? Why be friends with someone who goes quiet when I tell her I only have $4.00 and tries to reschedule for Friday when I get paid? How is that a reason to fantasize about her naked? Maybe a couple decades ago, maybe when I’d rub uglies together with anyone that would rub uglies with me, today? Nope.

It’s the other way. I’m the one with the domain, the running web site, the sandbox in which folk can play. I have a house where so far, the bills are getting paid. I have a car I don’t owe money on. I was born a citizen so the INS is just a far off, faint aspect of my government. Relative to her, I’m rich. It’s what I have that is attractive, not what I am. I had that in with the wife I left. Wife 2.0 will love me for what I am, for who I am, not just for what I have. SumYung HotTea, as I listed above, she’s got nothing for me. Here I am trying to bury the ghost of Webb’s past with the stuff about my grandfather and this, a woman so like us, so like the worst of our craziness, making the case that I should be happy to rejoin the mess I’ve tried so hard to heal because I need her. Yeah, I need her like I need bullet wounds.