S and I went to see this comedian about ten years ago who was so funny, our cheeks and neck and belly were aching when we left the auditorium. He was deemed the next Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy – only he was white and his name is Rick Reynolds. After that he was supposed to be in a television sitcom but it got cancelled and we never heard of him again.
He had this magnificent way of weaving tragic and comic pieces together so he would bring you down to your knees where tears would spring to your eyes and then he would hit you with the comic and you’d laugh so hard, it hurt.
One of his lines – which I could not do justice to – was about every year making a list of his friends. He went through the criteria in which he eliminated friends from the list. Sometimes with friendships – there are ties that bind but then one disagreement can dissolve your union, or there might be an argument that actually strengthens your friendship, or maybe simply the friendship expires because neither of you are giving each other what you need or care to anymore.
It fascinates me that I’m in a period in my life whereby I have one friend who I am trying to build bridges to after a hurtful rift (my hurt), one friend who has taken a slight on my part and decided to fire me because of it, and one recently, whose sensitivity is stratospheric under the influence of alcohol (and sometimes stone cold sober) and has caused me to say, uh oh, what now?
When relationships form the very essence of what you enjoy in your life, these three recent set-to’s beg the question: at what point does a friendship no longer serve the vested parties? How to know which are worth salvaging and which are worth allowing to dissolve under the law of natural attrition?