The Salmon of Capistrano
Day Four.
Last night I was thinking about this thing we did in elementary school where the teacher asked us to write down our five best friends, ranked in order of best-ness. In retrospect, this was an inherently cruel exercise, and I can't fathom its intended purpose. I hope it was just the faculty's way of gathering intel on our social movements, because my next best guess is that it was a pretty callous way of teaching us how to make a bulleted list. Even so, the part of this memory that really sticks out to me is what our teacher ordered us to write in the number one slot:
"Yourself- because you are your own best friend.”
I'm pretty sure I thought that was kind of weird at the time, but I probably complied because I was like seven years old at the time and an adult was telling me to do something and I apparently wasn't in the mood to be a little shit that day (when I was in the mood to be a little shit, oh man, could I be a little shit. This probably applies to my adult self as well).
In retrospect, though, isn't that just totally wrong? Contentment with oneself is a vital component of mental health, and there's nothing inherently bad about being a solitary person if that's your thing (it certainly is my thing at times), but you can't be friends with yourself. Friendship is the antithesis of self-love. The magic of friendship is that friends care about you and you care about them even though you aren't them and they aren't you. Of course you care about yourself; self-interest is hardwired into our systems. Calling yourself a great self-friend because you care about yourself is like calling someone a great mountaineer because they were born on top of Mount Everest. A friend is someone who will go out of their way to help you and lift you up when you can't carry yourself. A friend is someone who surprises you. A friend is someone that you would take a bullet for. By definition, you can't do any of those things for yourself.
And besides, if anyone in that hypothetical scenario is deserving of credit, it's the pregnant woman who hiked twenty-nine thousand feet uphill just to pop a baby out.
We're in Aspen today, back at the legendary Belly Up. That makes three ski towns in a row, so you should know the drill by now, which is good, because I'm running out of ways to say "picturesque snowscapes, upscale shopping.” And speaking of things I'm going to run out of ways to say over the course of this experiment, last night's show was really fun. We were in a lovely theatre-type space with beautiful acoustics and oh man, I'm pretty sure somebody bused a bunch of RevHeads in from somewhere, because Beaver Creek was screaming awesome. I saw a woman in the crowd holding up a Revivalists friendship collage and I'm getting a little verklempt just thinking about it. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic:
Facebook is neither a face, nor is it a book. Discuss.
