One of things that I hate most about myself is something that I am not even aware of. The thing is, to my friends, I am nothing, nothing, but a bar buddy. Never, or at the very least, rarely, do any of my friends call me up and invite me to a party, or an art show, or a concert, or a hockey game, or a symphony, or dinner, or a movie, or hanging out at their place, or a play, or an improv show, or a road trip, or a coffee shop trip, or even just call to talk. No one even e-mails me exeept in reply to my e-mails. Yes, I do some of these things, but they are always on my initiative or on my accidental discovery that they are going on, but rarely, if ever, do they bother thinking of me when they are doing something. The only time that I ever receive a call is when someone is going to the bar...and, frankly, I don't even like bars, I don't even like drinking for the most part -- my drinking at home in the last four months has consisted of, at most, twelves bottles of beer. But that is all I'm good for -- sitting in a dark bar and drinking alcohol. I don't know if it's because I'm only fun/interesting/worth hanging out with when I have a few drinks in me or if it's the dark lighting that hides my ogreness or if it's that in bars the people that people that people hang out with becomes anonymous or at least less important, but frankly, it leaves me feeling like I'm nothing but a piece of shit. A worthless piece of shit.

And yet I go. Not because I want to, but because I have to in order to have human contact that I desperately need lest I lose my mind to loneliness, solitude, and twenty-four hours a day of television broken up with fits of reading. I go because I care about my friends, friends that I honest to God care about and have feelings for even though I feel constantly abandoned and in need of mockingly putting quotation marks around the term. I go because I hope and pray that maybe some deeper friendship, a relationship even, might come of it at some point down the road. And it gives me hope, something to cling on to in those vast moments in between invitations to the bar, that maybe sometime someone will see enough good in me that I will be elevated to the status of someone that can be hung out with sober and in the light of day. Maybe even someone that can be loved.