Text: Comfort

Hey Blog, what's up? Nothing much here. Actually that's not true, I'm lying, but I'm not going to openly discuss my current endeavors. Instead I am just going to talk to you a little about love, life, and the way we choose to deal with it.

Tonight marks the third (maybe fourth?) anniversary of my mother's Christmas caroling party. Unfortunately it was too cold to sing out on the streets riding hay-back on a trailer pulled by a Ford. That's okay, because it allowed me to sit back, have a beer or two and realize why life is amazing.

Take my mom's best friends since high school for instance. My mother is 45 this year, so this friendship stretches back a long while. These friends of hers have been married for who knows how long and they never seem to show any discontent with each other. The guy, Dan, has been a major contribution to my mom's parties for ages. He plays the acoustic guitar and belts out Classic Rock ballads like Neil Young [which to him and I that is a compliment]. This does not sound like any extraordinary feat, I know. Anyone can play a guitar and sing along to entertain a mixed crowd. That's not really the point. The magic really is created by the fact that he has an appreciation for himself, what he delivers to everyone else, and how he made the choice to love someone who is his equal.

My main point really is to understand the levels of comfort, friendship, and love and how they all interact with each other to make the final product. [I just wanted to give him some props here, because I really respect who Dan is and how he continually gives with no expectation.]

There seems to be several levels of comfort involved in love. The more obvious one, to me, is the level of 'bad' comfort. That is when you become so comfortable with what you've become that you are willing to settle. You've packed up everything now and you sit around with your bags waiting to be escorted to the afterlife. Your interests are dull, you may even search for new ones only to realize that each one only temporarily diverts your attention from your looming boredom. You say "I Love You" to your loved one, but that is a misperception. You want to continue to purchase their loyalty to your boring life so that you can offer them unto others as a sign of success in some format. Your comfortable life is merely a picture you've painted that you hold up to the world so they can say "Wow, that's great. What you've done here looks really fucking neat. I wish I could lick your face so I can know what success tastes like."

The comfort I witnessed this evening really makes me appreciate life even more. When I look at Dan and his wife Cindy and I listen to him play music it makes me tell myself, "There are some fucking cool people in the world and they will make all the difference in the end." Is this post about me trying to come to terms with the aesthetic values of life? Maybe, but people who live and love together and compliment each other so well shows me that there is hope. That people do not have to sacrifice so much, because there is an underlying foundation of beauty that makes sacrifice nearly non-existent.

So why be with someone based on the aforementioned level of bad comfort? Are you just saying that this is the best you can do? Why give up hope that there isn't someone who fits you perfectly? Why surround yourself with people that do not compliment your humor or your true self? Why would you want to be with a girl, for example, that doesn't appreciate your jokes? I am 80% humor and 20% penis. If I was with a girl that did not absolutely enjoy my humor it might be the worst mistake of my life being with her. Humor is almost like an open bridge that connects two individual people who might not have anything in common other than what they laugh at. My best friend is a prime example of this. We share maybe two common interests but the majority of it is our humor. Is this something that you can only share with a close friend of the same-sex? I think that's a silly notion.

I've been very hopeful lately. There is someone behind it. There is someone who makes me happy and that appreciates my humor as much as I do theirs. What else do you really need beyond that? Life is here to be silly, laugh, love, have fun and then it ends. You don't get back time, so why waste it as if it weren't so? Why aggravate others, or bitch or complain? Just make do with what you're given and surround yourself with the people and things that allow you to be yourself, completely. That's all it takes.