Your Racist Friend

People often ask me why I'm such a miserable shut-in. "Why don't you go to parties, and meet people?"

Well, every time I go to a party, even a nice little going-away party for my property manager, for example, I'm reminded of just why I severely limit my interactions with the human race.

First off, everybody gets drunk. My life experience has taught me that about 1 in 6 people, give or take, are tolerable when they are intoxicated. The remainder are utterly intolerable for one or more of the following reasons:

1) They forget their manners, interrupt you, don't listen when you're talking, lose interest and walk away in the middle of conversations, etc. etc. This is not my idea of a good time. In fact, when these things happen, they reinforce my belief that most of the time I spend interacting with most people is in fact time that I am wasting and/or that these people are actively stealing from me.

2) They start getting faux-emotional, spontaneously telling people that they're "a good person" and that they "love them" and all that horseshit. We're talking about strangers: flat out, no-prior-meeting strangers. Strangers do not get to tell me that I'm a good person and that they love me. I do not need to be judged, however benevolently, by some drunk bitch I just met.

3) Their nasty questions (which they'd have probably asked anyway,) including but not limited to "Why are you a public defender?" and "What religion are you?" cannot be responded to effectively with anything approaching logic and reason. When people are drunk, everything they talk about, including their profound insights on racial differences between whites and blacks (or rather whites and everyone else) is discussed at the level of small talk. I am not going to attempt to educate a drunk bitch about why I believe in defending the constitution and that I'm agnostic or an atheist or whatever.

4) Related to number 3, people (especially middle class white people,) forget that they're supposed to be ashamed of being racist fucks. And so they feel it's totally appropriate to ask - in shocked, aghast tones - if I really defend Puerto Ricans. Note to these drunk middle class white racist fucks: I have a racist uncle or two that I see on most of the major holidays. The position is filled. Go home (and put a gun in your fucking mouth and pull the trigger.)

5) People are loud when they don't need to be. I don't like people talking loudly when they don't need to, for both personal and medical reasons. Not cool.

6) People also tend to get oafish, clumsy, and don't really respect personal space boundaries as well as they ought to.

7) There are WAY too many earnest conversations between the younger drunk guys about who they're trying to nail and how they're going to accomplish the feat. Going outside for a cigarette and an NSA briefing under the cone of fucking silence to discuss whether or not that hot blonde chick would cheat on her fiánce with you tonight really doesn't show your best side.

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Okay, well, that went on for much longer than I thought it would. Sorry. There are other reasons I hate going to parties. The music is shitty, the food is usually weird shit that I don't like, and I find that even before everyone gets shitfaced I have basically nothing in common with anyone else at the party. Tonight I was lucky enough to be able to talk about music for a few minutes with another person around my age. However, this is the same individual that last year spontaneously informed me that he had no sympathy for criminals and that we, as a society, "should just put a needle in their arm."

Also, when I'm asked to provide musical entertainment for functions, the crowd is invariably completely the wrong type of crowd for my musical stylings. So I have one or two people yelling at me to play, while the overwhelming geriatric supermajority wouldn't last three minutes into my first song.

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This post is terrible. I'm sorry. It's poorly written and all over the place and honestly, I just had a miserable fucking time tonight and had horrible pseudo-conversations with drunk people whose very cores I find to be ugly and deficient in myriad ways. I feel like shit and once again the very thought of dealing with people in a social setting is making me sick to my stomach. I am ashamed to be a part of the human race. So very ashamed.

I spend my professional life interacting with people whose lives are so alien to me I simply can't relate. On the one hand, it allows me to do my job dispassionately. At least I can be outraged that their rights are being trampled but not really internalize the shitstorms that are their existences. But on the other hand, because of my winning birth-lottery number and my upbrining I can't find common ground with them. They are my clients, not my people.

So who do I have common ground with? Not with most of the fuckwads I had to deal with tonight, that's for goddamn sure.

What the hell happened to an educated, liberal middle class? Is it a modern myth perpetuated by the history books? Did it exist for 15 years and then go extinct? Where are my people? Where do I belong?

The answer, of course, is this: I am a goddamn brain in a jar, and I belong in a small, lonely corner of the internet.