BEING NEGATIVE
While I’m on this negative kick I want to talk about an accusation some people have made about me. In particular is this one “friend” (I use the term loosely) named J. In 1998 J lived with me, along with a couple other roommates, in an apartment on 5th Ave. in Troy, NY. It was a crummy part of town, to say the least. We had crack dealers living two doors down to our right and white trash idiots who thought they were black two doors to the left. The white trash got riled up at us about some incident that is too lengthy to describe here, and they tried breaking in at midnight to kick our asses. When they couldn’t get in, they smashed in J’s rear windshield and scratched the word “fucker” into his hood. One day we came home to find our apartment broken into. Several items were missing: a Nintendo 64, a Sega Saturn, not to mention over 100 CDs of mine. They would pick fights with us constantly. On top of all this, one of my friends was hooking up with my girlfriend behind my back…despite both of them denying it to my face, swearing up and down nothing was going on…my relationship with my dad was strained, and I was constantly depressed because I had just graduated college with an English degree and had absolutely no idea where I could go with it. Plus all my “friends” were users and backstabbers.
Granted, mixed in with all this garbage was the occasional party or road trip, sometimes even a concert or two, but more or less the events that went down during this era were similar to the negative ones.
Every now and then, to this day, J tries to reminisce with me about those times. I say to him, “Dude, I don’t really to think about that particular timeframe. It’s full of bad memories for me.” And without fail J will reply, “That’s because you always focus on the negative. I remember having fun back then.”
Yeah, I remember fun too, dickbag! But there was a hell of a lot more bad than good. That’s not being negative…that’s being honest.
While talking to another friend about this, I came up with the following analogy. I never told it to J, but maybe he is reading it right now…
Let’s pick a day…any day, it doesn’t really matter. Okay, say the first Sunday of April. The first Sunday in April was a rainy miserable day. It was overcast from the second you got up. The sky was just an infinite wall of clouds…except for a couple minutes in the afternoon, when the sunlight managed to break through. The clouds came back only a few moments later, but the sun did shine for a short while.
Now, even though the day wasn’t 100% clouds, would you call that a sunny day?
I thought not.
Yes, there was an occasional burst of happiness in 1998…but so what? It doesn’t make me an overall negative person just because I feel a certain time in my life was mostly negative.
