Very, Very, Very Basic, Part the One Millionth

Things have been up and down. I'll get to that when I see a point; in the meantime, I'm just absorbing. Let Perrin write well about the down and divorced. It's beyond me at the moment.

Anyway, I want to acknowledge that it's damn hard to do things as an individual, let alone with other individuals.

It's hard to walk up to a party next door and make the request/demand that they turn down the music so that you or your baby or your baby's mother can sleep. Hard as a motherfucker to knock on the door of a neighbor you've never seen.

It is easier, in the moment, to use an intermediary. Maybe even easier than calling in a noise complaint is to do something underhanded, like slashing tires or feeding poison to their pets.

But which one you do has implications. Most everything has implications. Do you know what they are?

It is damn hard, as I imagined and now briefly have known, to talk to a person you have left. I bet it's pretty damn hard for that wife/lover/friend-with-mixed-penalties-and-benefits to look right back at you.

Easier, I bet, for her to mail in paperwork the day after counseling fails and have the bank take you off the joint account.

Easier, I bet, for her to send messages through children. Easier to have her parents come over when you're around. Easier to change the goddamned locks. Easier to use a lawyer through whom to talk and to whom one entrusts the wearying anger, vengeance, and other fun. And sure, for the purposes of the state and its recognition of future arrangements. But even with a little bit of lawyering and judgement, there's still a lot that can be done face to face. That's harder, I bet. Because you don't know how contractually unbound people will behave. Outside of the greatest acts and consequences, there's a lot of room. Unpredictability. Kinda like if you called the friends and their kids over. God knows what could happen.

But in Farmville friendships make sense.

When other people grow distant--and they invariably do--and have conflict of a certain level, we get uncomfortable. Easy for us to be distant too. Easy for us to employ interlocutors, go-betweens, and mutual spectacle.

The hardest thing still is to keep trying once someone else tries to put a barrier or an intermediary in your way. Likewise, returning to direct communication when you've yourself lapsed into abstraction.

And speaking of lapsing into abstraction, I'd better do some exercise. You know, divorce can be pretty unhealthy. If anyone jokes with me about how aged I should feel upon turning 30, I'll punch them in the face and kick them down a flight of stairs. In but seventeen days, my world has been shaken to its foundations. I am simultaneously heartened by the fact that I've been through worse and cheered to think that, after this, there are few things that can hurt so goddamned much.