With Friends Like This...

The use of the word "freak" in this post refers to people of questionable social skills and is not intended to disparage or demean people with physical or mental disabilites. Much. I have a history of attracting freaky friends. It used to be like I was wearing a sign that says, "Will befriend the hopeless", or "Freak? See me". I say "used to be" because I have benefited from a 12-step program called Freaks Anonymous or FA, for short. "Hi, my name is Merle and I like freaks." I have been freak-sober for 10 years now. I am a fairly sociable guy. I find most people interesting in one way or another and I don't mind striking up a conversation with people I meet. People's foibles tend to bother me less than most. That's more or less my problem. Perhaps I have one of them low self-esteems, or something, I don't know. My two most famous cases of doomed friendship were with guys named Dick and Ron, or as the lovely Mrs. Sneed and daughter Sneed dubbed them, Horsekick and Commander Swinger. They had a lot in common. Neither could hold a job, both went through friends pretty quickly and each had a long suffering spouse who supported them. Also, once I befriended them, it became apparent that the list of their friends was pretty short. Me. Mostly, though, they both had OPD, Obnoxious Personality Disorder. I met Dick (Horsekick) at a football game. He was sitting behind me and starting talking to me from two rows away. The next thing I knew he was sitting in my dining room playing cribbage. He had this disconcerting habit of keeping track of how many games we each won. At the end of a game he would blurt out that he had won 21 and I had won 17 games. He also knew the status of his games with other friends and family. Winning at cribbage was very important to Horsekick. He got the name Horsekick because of his unusual gait when he walked. Only cruel people give someone a nickname based on a physical limitation, not that I am saying that happened or anything. Horsekick was married to a rather plain-looking and severe woman who was decidedly weary of his antics. She constantly muttered at him under her breath. She had a lifetime of supporting him while he bounced from job to job and, if she ever had a real personality, he had worn it out. She seemed to be channeling the Winnie The Pooh character Eeyore all the time. He had these two horrible redheaded monster sons who would terrorize our house while he was there. He was forever showing up at our doorstep unannounced, with the monsters in tow. The lovely Mrs. Sneed finally told him to take his kids and beat it. That cooled our friendship way down. From time to time I would see Horsekick around town, but never spoke to him. He died fairly recently. He wasn't a bad guy, but he gave out bad vibes. I encountered Ron (Commander Swinger) at a restaurant that I used to go to in the mornings. As Yogi Berra said, it was dajevu all over again. He started talking to me from two booths away and was soon sitting across from me. He came to be called Commander Swinger because he had this air about him that was frankly creepy. Sometimes you can immediately tell if someone is shady and the Commander was that guy for sure. We have never actually meet a swinger that we know of, but we think the Commander is what one looks like. The Commander was married to a nice enough woman, who was the steady support of the family while he lost job after job and chased after all kind of crazy schemes. The thing that turned the world off to the Commander was that he was obnoxious and confrontational. Every interaction seemed to turn to ugliness around him. He had two states of employment, unemployed and about to be unemployed. Our first outing with the Swingers was to see a movie. The Commander freaked out the lovely Mrs. Sneed by relating a physical fight he had gotten into with a teenager at the same theater. A rule for life is don't hang around with a 50 year-old guy who gets into fist fights. I know that now. The Commander also lacked a minimal level of common decency. He saw no problem having a real estate agent show him homes he had no intention of buying, or taking the time of people to give him estimates for products he didn't want. One morning he started yelling at a guy in our restaurant and it turned out to be a guy who had tried to sell him a car. The Commander was convinced that the guy was a crook and thought it acceptable to yell at him in the restaurant. At middle-age the Commander suddenly rediscovered religion and put on a big show of how pious he was. He once confided to me that he had made a gift to his synagogue, but said that if the missus asked me about it, I was to profess ignorance. The easy thing would have been to not tell me about the gift, but then I wouldn't have known how super he was. He didn't see a disconnect between asking me to lie and doing good works. He got kind of ticked when the missus asked me and I let the cat out of the bag. I gave our friendship my best but one morning while listening to him rant about something, I stood up and told him I was done listening and that was it for us. Tonight when the lovely Mrs. Sneed and I went to get our dinner, I spied the Commander and Mrs. Swinger, sitting with two people we are passingly acquainted with. Poor schleps, they will learn. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor