I have always been fascinated by people who habitually attempt to cheat on other people.
I have done it, in the distant past, but very quickly gained sufficient stature and notoriety that everyone was aware of what I was doing and nobody seemed to be that bothered. Being considered so desirable that you have a few people wondering if they can distract you sufficiently to consider them as your only partner is a nice place to be.
What I can never understand is people who bother lying about it. This seems tedious. I am aware, because I have been with such people, that for some it is a kind of game to see how far you can push someone. This is not particularly healthy behaviour, and it is a bit manipulative. It is usually easier to just leave and go find somebody else.
This goes for friendships as well. It is easier to keep things honest, even if honest is not always what people want from you. One thing you learn as an itinerant caterer, is that your entire life can collapse overnight, so you simply learn not to invest terribly much in one person.
There is an inherent grubbiness in a more superficial perception of the world. If you are not investing terribly much, then anyone who is is either stupid, or so different from you that they had no business being in your life in the first place. This then becomes tiring, and inevitably the lack of stability affects other functionality. Unless you have retained that ‘centre of the universe’ position I first mentioned, life becomes rather shaky and so do you.
Having lived through these periods, and seen many different interest groups, with considerably different value systems, I selected a kind of lonely nobility. I try to do the right thing, and I try to avoid people in order to avoid doing the wrong thing to suit them. It is not particularly sociable, but this saves a lot of time.
This may seem very strange to anyone following the chain of thought that goes with my attempts to become more confident and less anti-social, but I think the way I am approaching other people now is better than it was before. I used to drop everything if someone needed something. I used to consider how useful I could make myself, and anything I wanted took a poor second place.
The current projects are of sufficient magnitude for this to now be irrelevant. Smaller tasks from other people, designed to distract and confuse, are now easy to turn down and bigger tasks, for the larger projects are broken into things I can do every day. It may seem strange to take on enormous tasks for people I do not know, but when they are more interesting, more challenging, and may lead to actual change they seem worthwhile. I have basically made my absurd helpfulness bigger, more confusing and more abstract in order to achieve an even bigger aim ultimately.
Time will tell if I have selected the correct people to bless with my angle of change, but both Wolfe and Boris are sufficiently intelligent to figure out what is happening and why when the time comes. It is going to take a long time.
At least is it less boring, even if it does seem odd.
Put the booze down and listen to the orb, Boris. Make it loud.