Rabbit Hole

 Inspired by my muse, Maggie, I went down a Facebook rabbit hole on the slim chance that I might find my old republican friend Paul. I don't think Facebook had been invented yet when I last heard from him in 2008, and I seriously doubted that he would be on it, but you never know about people. The key for me in finding people on FB is to begin by looking for known acquaintances that you know are on FB and seeing if they continued their relationship there. In 2009, everybody was on FB, at least for a hot minute until they figured out that they hated it. I quickly found two good suspects- Glenn and Frank- whom Paul and I had worked with that he may have friended. No go though. Found some other miscreants that I knew back in the day, including the horrible lesbian I had worked with in Memphis and a guy I thought might have been fucking the ex-wife back then. How the hell did Frank know those two?? The lesbian is stories for another day, and the guy is very unimportant to any story. Just a small world thing. 

So, no Paul, at least on FB. I was never surprised that Paul and I had been friends despite our political differences. We were both men of good wit and wisdom who found more to appreciate about each other than the politics of the day. We talked about it though. I remember asking him: "If anything ever happened to Dick Cheney, do you think George Bush would make a good president?" He fucking loved that! I think a lot of conservative republicans play the hand the party deals them no matter how useless they might actually think that hand is. He didn't really like Bush, just the con values he purported to represent. I get that. Don't like it, but I get it. This was pre-Trump, but I like to think Paul would have seen through him pretty easily, though gone with the concept of Trump as an (alleged) successful businessman for party unity and continuity. He would like my jokes about Trump and surely offer up his own. 

I don't know why people are republicans- especially now after a decade of Trump.  Come on now, that fiscal conservatism has been long since been blown out of the water like so many Venezuelan fishing boats. It's just sad when people today say that "republicans are good for the economy" with straight faces on TV or straight fingers on a keyboard. My late Aunt Carol was a six-term republican representative in in Massachusetts. I always told her she was the only republican I ever loved. She was pro-choice and anti-death penalty, which always made me wonder why she was a republican at all. But Massachusetts is a blue state and pretty open-minded politically and perhaps her success was those two democratic ideals. She wasn't kidding about them either. She was just a good person.

We left Memphis around the same time, though in different directions. I was a refugee from the Bush recession and Paul was too, but he had finally gotten a call from GM in Kansas for a job he had applied for years earlier. The money wasn't good and they told him in no uncertain terms that he would never be vested in the union, but I understood he needed the change from painting.

Paul was sort of a good person too. You might not think so if I told you more. I was different in Memphis too, describing myself as "nothing but a Yankee redneck myself". We're talking 20-some years ago when I was that much younger and struggling along in life. If we're lucky, life is a continuing education. A quest to find out who we really are. Not everybody gets there. Not everybody wants to. I'm curious (but not very hopeful) to see if Paul has found the political light or if he fell headfirst into the Maga bullshit. He's probably just still playing that lousy hand the party dealt. That wouldn't surprise me or really disappoint me because he was a friend no matter what. He could be dead. Our friend Timmy was a suicide six years ago and I knew they had kept up with each other. I'm well into the age group where you lose old friends to death of all kinds. That is life and the friends you meet along the way.