Justin - or a study in inaction

I once knew a man who did nothing but burn bridges. It wasn't an active burning of bridges so much as he just refused to put out the flames once they had started. He could have, but at the same time he'd rather be alone on an island than take the effort to put out them flames.

I first met him as he was trying to reaquire a group that he could belong to. You see he had had a falling out with a group of people and refused to associate with any of them (he only had a problem with a couple of the people, but as the group tended to hang out with those two people he was left unable to hang out with any of the group anymore). I actually knew the group he'd had a falling out with but I rarely associated with them (I see them more now, not sure why).

So we began to hang out and had a pretty good time together. Did all sorts of stuff, I mean we were hanging out almost every day. Parties and bars and drugs and runs to the corner store. Movies and video games and even a camping trip. I once wrote a story about a camping trip that I took my freshman year in college. The story moves on to tell how that group of people that had such an amazing time camping eventually fell apart. I could retell that story of Crater Lake except substitute the people from freshman year for the people that I met this year. But instead I'll just concentrate on the one, the rest of them are way too depressing to talk about too much.

So you are probably asking yourself how it all fell apart. And I will tell you. It wasn't all his fault, nothing ever is, but inaction is a choice that people make and it was his inability to choose a course of action that led him away from the group. My first sign that things were not going to end well was when I first began to hang out with Pauline. It's all coming back to me that this is why I began to hang out with the group that he no longer did. I'd known them all since college, but Pauline was new to me so I started hanging out with them more often. Which meant that buddy boy, Justin, refused to come and hang out when they were around, equating to me seeing less of him. You see, he could have tried to make amends with his former friends, they wanted to reconcile with him, but he refused. He took their stoner move as a stab in the back. Admittedly they missed his birthday, which I would be super pissed about too, but not so pissed as to ostracize myself from them.

Fast forward to a few months later and we still hang out, but not quite as much. I basically come home from work every day to Jemma and Justin, with an occasional Rachelle or Roman thrown in there, sitting in my living room smoking pot. I didn't know it, none of us did (maybe we would have if our minds weren't so clouded by the smoke) but this little set-up spelled trouble. You see (just an aside here, my readership is very small, I'm guessing around three or four people will actually set eyes on this, but I'm practicing for the future so I'm actually trying to explain as much as I feel is necessary for a person who knows nothing about me and my friends to understand what the hell I'm talking. Also, thank you to you three or four readers.) Jemma was dating Abel. But Justin and her were developing a friendship. Not that there is anything wrong with that, just you should always remember when making friends with the opposite sex you have to make sure to be on the signifacant other's good side.

So what happened? Well Jemma and Abel broke up. Which meant that Jemma was no longer able to greet me at home with offerings of marijuana. Which meant that Justin was no longer around with offerings of marijuana. Which was fine. It does not bother me to come home to an empty quiet house, it just means I get to read in piece. But it meant that Justin and Jemma were now hanging out, unchaperoned, outside of our pad. This in itself is not a crime, the transgression comes later.

I actually talked with Justin a little bit after the break-up. I remember telling him to be careful after he told me he was going to continue hanging out with Jemma. You see I knew that I didn't want to even mess with that. I'd done it once before, sorry Jake, and definitely took things farther than Justin did, but when I was confronted I didn't piddle around and put off confrontation. Okay maybe a bit but I'm getting sidetracked here, not everything is about ME you know.

Abel and Justin had a talk too. Abel laid down some very simple rules for Justin. I don't actually know what the rules were, but I'm fairly certain that they wouldn't be too hard to stick to. Anyway, one night Abel and Dennis and I are drinking. We decide to invite over Adam and Casey. Abel asked me if I'd talked to Justin lately. I said it had been over a week. Abel said that he'd been trying to get ahold of him for three or four days without any sort of success.
(Here's a good time to explain a fine point in dealing with ex-boyfriend's. If you are their friend, and are hanging out with their ex-girlfriend and your friend calls, you should answer the phone. If you are unable to, too stoned, drunk, in a movie, coitus, whatever, then you should call them back. That same day. If you don't then you are guilty until proven innocent. We're not the American Justice system here, we're a bunch of confused young adults who need to do everything we can to look out for ourselves.)

So Casey and Abel have a little talk. I still don't know the details of the talk. I just know that Abel came out of that conversation with a look of rage in his eye, achilles style rage. It had a been a really long time since I'd heard him yell like that. And he hasn't done it since, I'm sure he will, because that's part of who he is. And, unfortunately, Abel called up Justin at around 1:30 in the morning and proceeded to yell most furiously at his voice mail. I tried to explain that Justin would be sleeping and it would probably be best to talk to him in the morning, but then Abel reminded me of the calls that Justin had already refused to return. So Abel yelled mean threats at Justin and declared that he was banned from stepping foot in our apartment. I would have protested if I had not already banned a couple of other people from ever stepping foot in my residence. So instead I just understood where he was coming from and went with it.

I visited Justin once after this happened. The point was for me to go and talk to him and urge him to speak with Abel so they could get the whole stupid thing behind them. But inaction was what Justin wanted to go with. He sat and watched as his bridges burned. He was now out of the group. He had Jemma and her cohort as part of his new pseudo-group, but unfortunately for him Jemma reappeared as a character at our apartment.

The really quick break-down is that Abel and Jemma broke-up. This caused Justin to be banished. Does it make any sense, no, of course it doesn't. But that's what happened. If he ever wanted to get a beer, I'd probably do it. But he sure has made it hard for me to be able to hang out with. I'm a group jumper and he is now not allowed around two of the groups. It's just too bad it had to go down like that.