In my head, my friends...

In my head, you appreciate expensive scotch, which you drink with a single cube of ice in a tumbler on special occasions. This is not because I have ever seen you drink scotch or even talk about drinking scotch: it is mostly because I like scotch, and I like you, and you remind me somehow of a Graham Greene character — not the Whiskey Priest, I hasten to add, though you are a priest — Fowler, perhaps, although with a better sense of duty? — and therefore my mental image of you is of someone who drinks scotch.

In my head, you listen to Nick Cave’s spoken album, in which he talks about language and the Gospels, and you listen to the later albums he has done with the Bad Seeds, probably from The Boatman’s Call onward. This is despite the fact that I have on several occasions tried to get you to listen to those very same albums and they have not impressed you. It is mostly because you listen to Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, and because I associate those things in my mind with the same sorts of things that I associate Nick Cave.

In my head, you and I agree a lot more about political issues than we do in the real world, in actual fact. This is because I recognize in you the kind of honesty that often transcends partisanship, the kind that recognizes when it has made a bad argument or is committed itself to propositions with disastrous implications. In my more prideful moments, I like to believe that I too have that sort of honesty, and therefore on the basis of this shared, or possibly shared, virtue, we agree on our conclusions.

In my head, I know that you are different than I am. I know that, but I don’t believe it sometimes, and despite the evidence. I know that, but it doesn’t stop me imagining that we can be tuning forks to one another, in an odd way I don’t really understand, vibrating to a frequency only we can really hear. I believe that about about my friends, even when we — the you and I that composes the we that we are — don’t in fact vibrate to the same frequency at all.

gauche
06 Nov 09