sorry. i always find myself in a position to know a few. i know a lot of crazy people. homeless people, porn addicts, drug addicts, do-nothing-gangbangers. i spend more time around the disaffected than i do with people who have something to lose. i don’t know anyone with a masters degree.
when i was a teenager, running around smoking weed and being jailbait, my mom said something she’d say to me about ten years later when some guy from my college broke into my house to give me a poem he’d written for me. it’s a narrative i learned from my mom. it’s something she fed to me, about me. she told me that i always have to see the good in people, even when there isn’t much. she said this morose. she said this all the time. you get into people’s souls. it’s a weird way to grow up. believing that young men or old men might need me, or that i am capable of healing the world. it’s just something my mom said about me and then it became true, but we were all sad about it. like, here she goes again, making friends with the deranged. i’d say i have a normal amount of empathy. i don’t think i came out the womb ready to be a hospital or religious organization. i guess maybe you could argue that i ended up around so many disaffected people because of this, because of my charitable spirit. i propose something else. something more selfish and bizarre, not at all altruistic. not at all christlike. not at all like my mom really wanted from me.
when the guy from college broke into my house she said the same thing. because i’d been nice to this guy from college at all, it was because i saw the goodness in him. because i didn’t know how weird he was and that of course he was going to do something like that but you just don’t see it, do you?
and my answer is: i don't know, it does usually surprise me.