Upon the Overrating of Friendships

Introit

Sorry for the absence, dear friends, and a special apology to all of you who have recently visited whilst seeking guidance on how to build a trebuchet. There were, inexplicably, four of you just today, and we're fairly certain that you left unsatisfied.

Whoever you are, and however you got here, you should know that we hold the destruction of the Fairness Doctrine under Ronald Reagan at least partially responsible for the demise of an already-struggling democracy in the U.S.A. The horsefucker lovers got that photo of an increasingly embattled Katherine Harris, and what did you get, dear lovers of the trebuchet? Bupkus. In the interest of providing equal time to filly-uhs and philias, therefore, we offer you lovers of medieval war engines the attached photo of a particularly fine specimen.

Visitor, beat your dick like it owes you money.

It's been a rough week for the world, friends, and not a particularly easy week here at The Swill. But our problems are not yet your problems, and by now you're saying to yourself: now that I've taken the trouble to visit the House of Long Knives, what corporate or political monstrosity will be cut down to size? While I'm enjoying the pretty photos, what good deed will the Swill's prose accomplish, what ethical or aesthetic system will be retooled into a finely honed fighting machine with every sentence, what particular pleasure will I take from this, the champion of underdog causes?

The answer is: None at all, friends. Na-fucking-da.

A Few Things We Won't Talk About

We won't address the hilarious spectacle of W. encouraging his Chinese counterpart to allow free speech while arresting and charging a woman who spoke too freely. That would be too easy, and nobody gives a flying fuck about paradox or irony anymore in these here parts. (Plus, we'd kind of like to retain the right to imprison and torture members of particular religious sects, just in case we are named dictator-for-life and have the opportunity to visit a few fellow Christians.)

We don't even have anything to say about the emergence of retired military warlards, who -- secure in their pensions and about four years too late -- have decided to pick on poor old Donald Rumsfeld, that scrofulous prick, for mishandling the destruction of Iraq.

Despite your understandable pleas for instructions on how to think about this issue, there are two reasons why we refuse comment at this time: First, and most important, some of you may know that one of the Swill's senior writers loves his grandma, and that the ancestral ranch where said grandmother was born is currently one of two homes owned by Rumsfeld in Taos, NM. We are biased by self-interest and by a particular version of our past that exists only in sweet and radically selective memory. Second, we have yet to conduct a full analysis, and hate nothing so much as hastiness.

After all, pointing out that the invasion of Iraq is a murderous clusterfuck that was totally and utterly unnecessary? Excellent. Emphasizing the misconception that the 100,000 people your tax dollars have blown up in Iraq are the result of a tactical -- rather than an ethical -- disaster? Ummmmm. Further authorizing the voice of the military as the voice of truth in America, while simultaneously eroding the important distinction between civilian and military leaderships? We'll get back to you. [Here the writer further refuses to talk about the epidemic of birth defects among Iraqi children caused by the use of depleted-uranium shells in both Gulf Wars. Including, you know, the one that was a success. - ed]

No, we have nothing to say except Spring is here, and with the emergence of leaves in our little courtyard comes a flood of fond, arborial memories.... (insert wavy lens effect here)

A Recollection both True and Incidentally Allegorical

As a young man, one of the Swill's low-level editors spent some hard months cutting down big, healthy trees to earn a very few bucks. It was dangerous work, a short-handed and dim-witted operation where one had the opportunity to fell trees one day and set chokers the next, but he liked the way that nature would dwarf him with its majesty, remind him how small he was in the world, compel him to recognize his transient insignificance in the shadow of such seemingly timeless endurance.

He especially liked to reflect upon these feelings as the 32-inch bar of his chainsaw was chewing through and destroying the lovely vegetation that had, mere moments before, been one in a long line of quasi-sentient beings in the world that made him feel small and worthless. Take that, nature!

In the end, we suppose that we're concerned with neither trees nor with Spring, nor even with that sonofabitch "Scott" who ran the logging operation, who left town in the middle of the night, who screwed us out of a month's wage, and who will suffer the wrong end of a very bloody bottlewhipping if we're ever fortunate enough to sidle up next to him at a bar to be named later.

No, we suppose that what concerns us is the productive capacity of memory for pleasure or pain, and particularly to render the future prospect of human contact a pleasant or unpleasant one. Which, [If this post hadn't already turned into a maudlin piece of self-indulgent tripe - ed.] we would be happy to explore via a close reading of "The Big Chill," a free screening of which we attended this evening after a large plate of $2 mussels.

A Film We Won't Discuss

Oh My, how we would remind you of what a piece of crap this movie is, how it ruined American cinema by popularizing, if not devising, the obligatory faux-spontaneous-group-dance-singalong sequence, wherein a group of white middle-aged actors get their collective lip-syncing groove on to a Wilson Pickett song.

We would talk about how writer/director Lawrence Kasdan, who attended the screening and who spoke afterwards, served his audience a poisonous disappointment. We would point to or produce the moment when the audience failed to realize that they might well outgrow a variety of beauty myths (after all, beauty is youth, and we'll all get old), but that they would never outgrow the horrifically misguided sense that they should have had a youth that was eager and pure and idealistic. They would never shake the sense that, even if they'd sold out and bought houses and obeyed cops, it was okay because from their various outposts of demi-disillusioned success they might always come together around a funeral and be themselves, just share the love of a eight people who know each other well enough that they don't have to pretend. They will wake up in the middle of the night feeling that their lives, rather than this film, are failures, because they certainly don't have a group friendship that is simultaneously fascinating and deep and loving and trusting and jocular and true.

And neither do you.

The Crux of the Biscuit, or, Synthesize It Yourselves

That gnawing feeling in your gut isn't too much microwave popcorn, friends, it is disappointment. Friendships don't work like that, as everybody should know. You'll never spontaneously dance around a butcher-block over a classic hit from your youth, you'll never realize that you're among a coterie of people who love you whether you're right or wrong, you'll never have a space where you can retreat from the performance of everyday life, and you'll never live a life without wishing that you could retract a confidence that you made in haste. Friendship offers no collective redemption, and if it does then you're probably not paying attention, and watch out for what you deserve.

But we can't talk about that, because there's a few ice-cold bottles of Old Style that are saying nicer things to us than the whole lot of you combined, and even they recognize that it's horseshit: Kasdan, it was horseshit when you wrote it, it's horseshit today. The last five minutes of La Dolce Vita have more to say about friendship than your entire oeuvre; the monster has been dead for three days but it's still looking you flat in the eye, and you can haul it up and sell it off but it won't stop looking at you, or us, or anyone.

Indeed, if we were to speak of it, we'd go so far to say that the whole goddam tragic failure of America in the last forty years can be summed up by the hugely successful soundtrack of "The Big Chill." Consider: in a film about the reunion of friends who met and bonded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, student friends who were politically radical and idealistic and who then bore hopes and dreams for the future as strongly as they now bear wistful nostalgia for the past, their memories and bodies are enlivened and enlisted by the goddamn Rascals instead of The MC-5. Their soundtrack, which they admit hasn't changed since the heady days when last they were ensemble, is defined by the eternal organ of The Rolling Stones and not a drop of Gil Scott Heron.

And that, friends, is a pernicious form of selective memory for a youth that never happened. But it's best not to speak of it. Best not to say anything at all.