So here's the thing. It doesn't matter where it comes from, as long as you can find it for a while, use it, and make it to where you're going. Tonight was necessary. Very Necessary, to use the title to a Salt-N-Pepa album that has absolutely nothing to do with this post. I'm not going to talk about Sex. I don't want to shoop. But I do want to keep a hold of the feeling I have inside right now, cos it's a good one. It's a little to do with the Manhattan and Martini and double Whiskey, but mostly to do with the conversation of the last two and a half hours.

I went to Europe with 29 lucky people my sophomore year of University. I wish I had the arrogance to claim they were lucky cos they went with me, but no. The reason they were lucky is because Holy Fuck! Europe for a year when you're nineteen! So I went over there with these people I knew a little or a lot or nothing about, and after the year I knew a little more or a little less about all of them. But the funny thing about being over there is that while I made some of the best friendships of my life, that wasn't even the important part. It set me up for what was to come.

To come was now. And not now in the sense of some fleeting moment that is always just gone, but now as in a state of mind. It makes more sense to measure your life in states of mind, or transitions from one to the next. So I like to think that everything was leading to here, it is the recent discovery of friendships I laid years ago that is going to get me out of this now, and in to the next.

Confused? Good, me too. Should probably have had a single.

So here it is. I've been lucky in my life that I've had almost no one I've been close to die. Grandparents, Great-something-or-others, a cousin, but I was younger than twelve for all of them, and no one recently enough to affect me, until Greg a couple of months ago. And his death has been in the back of my mind since in found out about it, because fuck, thirties is too young to die, and because the conversations I'd had with him in the couple years before had made me feel not so alone.

When part of your crutch, one of your coping mechanisms is taken away, it hurts. And you go back to some of the things you've gone through before, because there's something of a regression whether you want there to be or not.

Here's the thing, though. You're never alone. Never fucking alone. No matter how bleak, how helpless, how unique you feel, someone else has been there before, is there right now, and is going through what you're going. And you lose sight of that in the bollocks of living your life, and saying the things you're supposed to say to the people you're supposed to say it to, when all you want to do is scream, or sing, or tell someone to stop being a twat. And while I'm way too much of a pussy to ever let the totally minor hardships that I come across in life-- loss of value in my house, grey hairs, less than satisfactory performance in the sack-- push me to the point of ending it all, it takes some convincing to remember that I'm not alone sometimes.

I'm rambling. Going back and looking at the rest of this post I can see that, but it's still helping me get to what I want to say right now. So if you've made it this far, and you're still following the tenuous thread of this badly grammaticized post, here's my point.

Take the time to talk to people. Share yourself, and let them share themselves. Because you never know what you can give to each other, and you never know what the other bugger's going to take away from the conversation. An almost-three-hour, mildly-alcohol-encouraged conversation made me get to this point:

We're both better than we'll admit to, and while that's somewhat endearing, it ain't going to get us to where we want to go. And we're both worse than we want to be, because that's just the nature of being alive. There's always lapses regardless of your moral code or belief system, and as long as those lapses don't affect your ability to be a member of the human race, you're ahead of the game. Because after tonight, I understand it isn't BAD to use a friend for the people he knows. And I think he's in the same place, and gods I wish I was in a point to be used. And I feel more motivated that I have in a long time, and if I never get rid of this white-hot, soul-twitching, stupid-pose-in-front-of-the-mirror-inducing feeling, then it's too soon and I'm not ready yet and don't take my keyboard or my drink or my internet access away just yet, and I'm sorry and you need to fuck off or raise a glass and say here's to all of it in all its glory and disappointment and wonder, and just understand that motivation is wherever you force it from.