Best Friends

I just got home from work/class and I am alone again, as usual. I feel no desire to seek out others and spend my time with them. I go straight home almost always. To be honest, I feel a great desire to spend time with others, it's just that I don't feel like it (oxymoron).
This brings me to the contemplation of friendship. As a younger man I had "best friends," plural because I moved around a lot. They were my own personal dedicated best friend and I theirs. We would share everything with each other. We were support, encouragement, and security, all rolled up into one. Then one or the other of us would get a lover and the friendship would go out the window. Although I didn't realize it at the time, this was simply a foreshadowing of what would occur with my older friends, later in life. Then it would be called marriage. Call it what you will, the sacred bond of friendship gets traded for the sacred bond of love. And rarely are friends ever treated the same after.
I have not had a best friend for five years, though then we were called "Road Dogs." His name is Secondo, but everyone called him Tony. We were both homeless in San Francisco, both prefferred the downtown area, read sci-fi, and we were both drunks. Besides these things and our amiable personalities we had almost nothing else in common. I was 22 and white. He was 40 and "Nigga-Rican (his term)". I was from San Francisco and he was from New York. He used to be a crack head, I used to be a heroin junkie. But we really got along and ended up having a lot of fun together despite our life circumstances. If I passed out, he would drag me to safety. If he was about to kill someone, I would calm him down. We were someone the other could depend upon and the more we proved that to each other the more solid the trust between us became. Shoot, I'm getting all teary just thinking about him. I still love him and always will.
Before Tony I had been really into this girl and heroin so I hadn't had a best friend for about 2 years. Before that I had a best friend who OD'd and got brain dammage.
Now I have many former best friends. And we still "talk." Which means we see each other very breifly, once in a blue moon, and stare at each other in amazement of what the other has become. There is no way to explain to the other what has changed. So one just hangs out and lets life be. Gone is the best friend of youth who knew everything about you and could always provide the most lucid council. That is now what Mates are for. And not lovers either (just observing), they don't want to hear your whole life story. That's for the serious significant other. Oh yeah, or a therapist. Those are good too, but it takes time to find a decent one, they can be expensive, and they don't kiss you generally.
_sigh_, and noone is to blame for this, of course. The simple fact is that the older you get, the more life experience you have to process, so the more complicated it gets. Its simply not possible to share all your experiences with someone else, the older you get. Short of spending three weeks of every year in a sweat lodge with your most intimite circle, it seems to have logistic difficulties. So, where does that leave us? Oh yeah... I'll right a blog.