Mr. Belvedere Didn't Have a Best Friend So He Knows The Struggle

I'm don't like the term "best friend." I think it's a silly phrase that people use to try to qualify their relationships as meaningful. This mainly stems from the fact that the word "best" is a word that no one can top. Essentially, you're saying that your friend can't get any better; they are already the best person to you. This can only lead to a precipitous fall from grace when they stop returning your phone calls because they are too busy "hanging up paintings" or "having children." Why do people have to always have someone or something that's the best? Why can't we all just have good friends or better friends? I don't have a prototypical best friend. I consider all my close friends, better friends and all my other friends, good friends. I don't like the finality of having a best friend except for the part where I get the Best friends part of the necklace and my other friend gets to wear "forever".

It's all about the bling.

The irony of this whole thing is that for a good part of my life I was dying for a best friend. Literally. I think I used literally wrong. How American of me. I wanted to put a label on my friendship with one person as proof that someone actually thought I was the best at something other than sitting on the couch or quoting Doug E. Doug lines from Cool Runnings. It's not until the last couple years where I've been ok with not having that one friend to call the best.

There's really no problem with having a group of people that are better friends at certain parts of your lives than others. You could have a friend that's great to talk to about relationships. One that makes you laugh. One that helps you with work issues. One that you talk about sports with or General Hospital or both. We call that person a Renaissance Man. I don't think you could find one person to encompass all the issues we all deal with in life. Actually, I lied. There is one. Mr. Belvedere.

He had ALL the answers. Dude saw every General Hospital episode. Check the bio.

The only good thing about best friends is that it's the only time people actually tell each other how they feel about them. Aside from the "I love yous" we tell the people we are having adult relations with, we rarely, if ever, tell our friends what we feel about them. The only time we do is when someone will say, "Hey, come meet my best friend Joey." See, now Joey knows that he is qualified as best to that person and on some level he knows what he means to them. On the other hand if you're a grown man and go by the name Joey, you should re-evaluate.

Over the last 6 months I've decided that I'm telling people how I feel about them. People should know that you love them before it's too late. That fact hit home for me when my father had a heart attack 3 weeks before my 30th birthday. To come that close to losing someone without ever thanking them for taking me all the baseball games, being supportive and sticking me with a $30,000 student loan for a college degree I don't use was harrowing.

Thanks Dad for not being more rich.

I think about the moment of when I'm going to die a lot. I usually wonder what it's going to be and which way I want to go out. Some call it morbid, but I call it reality. The whole reason for thinking about death is that I want to make sure when I die I've said everything I've wanted to say. I always ask myself the question "If I die today, am I ok with that?" For a long time that answer was no, but over the past year I've become better at opening up and letting people in and that's because of this person. She totally changed my outlook on everything.

We live in an era where it's weird to open up to people that are still living. People ask you what's wrong and why you're saying things like that. Emotion is not supposed to be shown to "just" friends. Well, that's wrong. How else are people supposed to know what they mean to us? After reading Laurenne's two amazingly open and raw posts about Mike DeStefano, I was crushed. Not because I knew Mike, aside from that one time I saw him on stage and he dropped a county record (unofficial) 127 f-bombs in 12 minutes, but because she never got to tell him all those things.

Before I met Laurenne I was definitely closed off. I didn't let anyone see my feelings and if I thought it would hurt someone I wouldn't say anything even though it was hurting me. I remember the first time I met her thinking about how she put everything out on the table. There was no feeling that this was a stranger and she should hold back. It was refreshing and honest and frankly, a little strange. Talking to someone from the Internet about feelings on plastic surgery and putting that out there was a little alarming to someone who's idea of talking about a controversial topic was how M&M’s added a blue one.

Always bet on blue.

And while she’s probably going to be a little embarrassed that I’m writing this, I really don’t care. And I know some people are going to be critical since I'm saying this in public, but tough. Those people will be critical because they're afraid to put themselves out there. Because if you don’t tell people what they’ve done for you they’ll never know.

She’s made me take more chances by putting me in her show (Taboo Tales March 24th, Zephyr Theater, Los Angeles. In the business we call that a “plug”) where I told a story I thought I was taking to my grave. Just knowing her has made me not hold things in that I normally would and push the envelope. She’s encouraged me to write more and, in general, been supportive even though I find this blog only humorous 32 percent of the time (science). I’m sure one day we may not be “better” friends when she runs off with a Benicio Del Toro doppelganger from Argentina or gives up on me when I put VERY URGENT in another e-mail subject line, but I’ll never regret that I didn’t say what I wanted to say to her or that I love her and what she’s done for me. When I win the Oscar for best original screenplay she will be the second person I thank. The first person I thank will be me for winning.

What about me?

Sometimes it takes a tragedy or near tragedy to realize that time is fleeting. I could tell all 10 people that read this blog to tell your friends how you feel, but I know it won’t happen. We need something to trigger it in all of us. With the natural disasters in Japan and the world changing at a rate that we can’t comprehend, we never know when we lose the opportunity to get our feelings out so I want to make sure I say something I never got to say.

Thanks Mr. Belvedere. I loved your ‘Stache.