Ask the Box

20 jul 06

"Could you please name your best friend or are you going to duck out of this question?"

ha, good one. sorry, but i'm going to have to try and ferret out the person who submitted this. i normally don't, because it's more fun that way, but this guy really has it coming.

this unscrupulous character is rahul d. gor, M.D., of bel air, maryland, or possibly his wife, but almost certainly not. he's the only one who was visiting this site at around 8:10pm, which was when the question was submitted. furthermore, rahul likes to ask questions he thinks are going to rattle me. "rahul and wife" is one of the parties i can precisely identify with their ISP information.

i know exactly what you're doing; the electronic eye has focused on you. it watches, silent and unblinking.

my best friend's name is lee bachoon, and he used to live, along with me, near montreal, canada. his mother and my mother were friends, and lee and i grew up together.

before we could talk, lee and i were hanging out, in our little bassinets or whatever, when our mothers got together. then, we progressed to playing on the floor and drooling on each other's toys. when i was three, four, or five, lee had two other rivals that i can remember: girls named tamara and rachel. however, they weren't serious rivals. rachel was sort of a bitch, actually -- let's say she wanted to play with a toy that i had my hands on. she'd say "i'll be your best friend if you give it to me". i'd refuse. then came, "i won't be your friend if you don't give it to me". that always worked. manipulative jezebel.

one year, i remember that i invited only lee to my house for my birthday. that was sort of weird. but, it throws the "unambigous best friend" thing into further relief.

tamara, lee and i would sometimes all play together, and when we did, lee and i would gang up on tamara and pick on her. but then, when i'd play with tamara without lee, i'd be really sweet. once she said that this made her sad. really, i'm a horrible person. what's worse is that this behavior pattern continued, and continues -- i'm very, very easily influenced by other people. i naturally take on the submissive role in a relationship, and just sort of float around, taking direction. the great evil of mankind isn't betrayal, violence, or lust, but rather obeisance. a lot of evil has been commited through those means; consider the nuremburg defense (befehl ist befehl). i'm a turd.

during the last few of my years in montreal, lee had another rival for "best friend" -- his name was eric parquet, and i think i actually had a lot more in common with him than i did with lee. lee was confident and un-neurotic, and eric was introspective and nerdy, like me. i believe the two met once, and decided to hate each other. funny.

i tried google-sleuthing eric once, and found an "eric parquet" in canada studying engineering. i wrote him, and he replied that he didn't know who i was.

i had another friend named erik (with a k), but he wasn't in the runnings for "best friend", even though we had breeched the "go over to each others' houses to play" barrier. i mention erik-with-a-K because i did sucessfully track him down a few years ago. he ended up in the canadian military, with a wife and adored dog. we exchanged a few emails, and then i somehow made my way onto his "family photo" group email list. i guess i eventually got taken off, because i haven't gotten one in a long while. anyway, that was the last i heard from erik. i never did find eric. actually, he and i had one of those odd, natural fallings-out that kids sometimes have, a year or two before i left.

i have a few memories of eric. one really strange one is of him approaching me on the playground, his face all screwed up from crying, to show me how his teeth had been all bashed up into a bloody mess (i think he had fallen down, and this had knocked out a baby tooth). immediately after he presented himself, and before i could do anything (i'm not sure what i would have done), some other kid dragged him off to the school nurse.

eric and i used to play marbles at school. it was't a very formal game; "person A" would set "marble A" down, and "person B" would shoot "marble B" at "marbel A". if "marble B" hit "marble A", then "person B" got to keep "marble A".

another memory is of listening to his imitation of the noise pac-man made when pac-man was racing around the maze, but had no pellets to eat ("WAHahWAHahWAHahWAHahWAHah").

and then there was the snowpants incident.

snowpants were seen as babyish and stupid by canadian kids who were made to wear them. some days, it was obvious that everone would be wearing them, so at least no one would stand out as being particularly uncool. but some days were iffy -- some kids might wear them, and others might not, depending on how overprotective his parents were feeling. one of these snowpants-ambiguous mornings, i called eric's mother and asked, "is eric wearing snowpants?" i didn't want to wear them if he wasn't.

back to lee. when i came back to visit him a couple of years after i moved to the great satan (right at the onset of puberty), it was obvious that he and i had taken totally different paths. i think he was the one who changed, but maybe it happened to me, too, without my noticing. that was the last contact i had with him, even though his mother emailed me less than a year ago. she had found me on the web, and wanted to get in touch with my mom. she did -- they said "hi", and i guess that was the end of it. sort of sad and anticlimactic, these human relationships.

one more interesting thing about lee that i'll mention. he and i used to torment his little sister, allana. i distinctly remember one day we were trying to think of things to do. i listed "leggo, tv, atari, or bug allana?" to this, lee replied evily "let's bug allana". i don't remember what we did to her.

i'm an only child, and "bugging allana" was a formative experience for me -- that's how i thought all younger siblings were to be treated. after i came to the states, i made other friends, oddly enough (this comes so easily to kids, and then we sort of forget how). one of these had a little brother, and i immediately started to insult him, thinking this was just what one did. i saw my new friend comforting his younger brother, and looking at me like i was some kind of sicko. then i realized that lee and i tormenting his younger sister wasn't necessarily normal sibling behavior, although i think it does often happen. but sometimes sibs are nice to each other. i dunno -- this is out of my ballpark, really. from what i've read and observed, sibling behavior and relationships vary wildly. but back then i thought 100% of them picked on their younger ones, and was embarrassingly proven wrong.

but it's funny how the phrase "best friend" gets thrown around. is having a "best friend" practice for monogamy? a lot of people say their best friend is their spouse. after they have kids, this often becomes even more the case. this isn't true for everyone, but it often is. maybe having a "best friend" is something that is natural for some people. but i guess it never was for for me -- maybe this is reflected in my attitude on marriage. actually, i remember some demands of "who's your best friend?!" coming from people when i was young, and me not being able to answer. this is an ongoing theme.

i'm not as close to any of my friends as i was in childhood and adolescence, and even young adulthood, which i think is the normal pattern, except most people replace this intimacy with a romantic partner. then, the couple has other couple-friends whom they sort of hate and gossip about. and that's the way the world works. but this didn't happen to me -- i just sort of drifted apart from everyone, and didn't find any replacements.

what in sam hell are you supposed to do with someone when you're an adult, since you can't play transformers anymore? go to movies? out to dinner? how awful and regimented -- nazi playtime. i remember my dad had a couple of bachelor friends when i was a youngster in canada. i'm not entirely sure what they did together -- i think they sat around and talked, mostly. i guess this is an ok thing to do, if you're one of those people who has "friends" when you're older, and it's especially ok if you accompany the talking with some beer. but really, you never have "friends" the way you did when you were young; it's just not the same.

a lot of the time, it seems like being 10 years old in canada was the last time i was really happy, but i suppose this sort of lamenting for lost childhood is a cliche.

oh, i forgot one -- my best friend was katy, my dog, 'till she died. i guess the point is that sometimes i have a best friend, but it doesn't last. these best friends rotate around, falling in and out of the postion. but now, i don't have one, seriously. i probably would indeed "duck out of this question" if i did have one, but the fact is that i don't. sorry.

hope your sex reassignment surgery goes well.