{"id":8936,"date":"2016-06-08T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T11:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=8936"},"modified":"2016-06-08T11:56:20","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T16:56:20","slug":"its-fair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/8936","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s Fair"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Taking a wee stroll through my blog archives, I found this I posted, in a cloud of euphoria, <a href=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1288\">on April 27, 2008<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>True Friends<\/strong><br \/>A couple of very dear friends tried to do something for me over the weekend that I&#8217;ve tried to do a time or two for other friends, mostly straight, but which nobody has ever bothered to do for me before. I can&#8217;t go into detail now&#8230;maybe some day soon&#8230;but I&#8217;ve never felt so loved. And even though they didn&#8217;t quite manage to pull it off just the fact that they did it it made me feel more alive now, more connected with the life I have, and the things I&#8217;ve managed to accomplish for myself, then I have since I was in my twenties. Seriously. I&#8217;ve been a sleep walker for most of the last half of my life it seems. I feel somewhat awakened now. More&#8230;real.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Life is sweet.<\/p>\n<p>It lasted until I finally realized they didn&#8217;t actually give a shit at all&#8230;which took six months because even in my fifties I still had a hard time really understanding how cruel people can be when it&#8217;s the easier path for them to take. They say that what doesn&#8217;t kill you makes you stronger. Well&#8230;the Joker said it makes you <em>Stranger<\/em>, but then you find yourself wondering at the end of that movie if he didn&#8217;t carve that smile into his face himself because he knew at some point in his life he&#8217;d never wear a smile again otherwise.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>You know what I&#8217;ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell you that gay kids are still being thrown into ex-gay therapy against their will, or a gay guy will get the crap beaten out of him by a car full of drunken fratboys the night after some republican goes on a TV rant about Religious Freedom, or that tomorrow a preacher will tell his congregation that gays should be executed and someone in the pews will go shoot up a pride day parade the next day, nobody panics, because it&#8217;s all part of the plan. But when I say that one lonely old gay man just might find somebody to love, well then everyone loses their minds!<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>&#8220;Oh&#8230;and you know the thing about indifference \u00a0Harvey? It&#8217;s Fair.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"> \u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/applause.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-8937\" src=\"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/applause.gif\" alt=\"applause\" width=\"500\" height=\"206\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Taking a wee stroll through my blog archives, I found this I posted, in a cloud of euphoria, on April 27, 2008&#8230; True FriendsA couple of very dear friends tried to do something for me over the weekend that I&#8217;ve tried to do a time or two for other friends, mostly straight, but which nobody [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[145,105,130],"class_list":["post-8936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-a-life","tag-feckless-friends","tag-lonelyache"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8936\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}