My best friend is getting married in March. He knew her briefly in 2003, he knows her vehemently in 2019. I saw her twice in 2003, I've seen her once in 2019. She was a bitch then, she's a bitch now. The difference is she's been through AA, she's been through therapy, she's on a half-dozen antipsychotics, she has a health maintenance regimen as if she were going to the Crazy Bitch Olympics and she lives in Singapore.

The wedding is in Singapore.

I was all set to go because yeah, it's a fuckin' 20 hour flight but I was digging around coming up with awesome music-on-hold trax by ripping them through Audio Hijack and I went to download Audio Hijack and discovered I already had it installed on this computer because I used it two years ago to do post on that project where he totally burned me and I realized just how fucking mad I still am.

Because for 30 years, I have been advising this guy and for 30 years, he has been soliciting my advice, questioning my advice, ignoring my advice, complaining about the results and then grudgingly acknowledging that he should have taken my advice and it gets so fucking tiresome. And for 30 years, he has never been there when I needed him but he's needed me and I've always been there. And because he fucked me so. BADLY last time that he knows better than to ask my fucking advice so he's full-speed-ahead with this relationship to a Korean national living as a resident alien in Singapore and he's 100% gung ho about walking her through the citizenship process in Trump's America on a tenuous lifestyle that costs him $150k to maintain.

She came out for six weeks. They bought a cat together. Then she went back to Singapore.

All of his friends suck, including myself, no doubt. I don't know how many of them will be there. The guy he fucked me over for probably will be. The last time I was overseas with him I pilloried him over his contempt for the sarari class because he had no understanding as a freelancer. Within three months he was working in the worst office environment I've ever observed and he's been there ever since. Like twelve years. Meanwhile I became a freelancer and I'm effectively retired seven months a year, whereas when we were in Thailand I was burning 90 hours a week doing bullshit in an office. There's some schadenfreude there.

I think he's attracted to how badly she wants to be married without understanding that he's an accessory, not the centerpiece. I know another guy who was in that trap for 19 years. He got left as he was recovering from kidney replacement. He's a bitter, bitter man but at least he was divorced by 42. And I think their families are gung-ho about this because they thought marriage would never happen for either of them and since neither of them has spent much time with each others' families they're entirely about the abstract without any concrete. But does any of that really fucking matter?

I'm faced with having to say "no I'm not burning a week in Singapore arranging your wedding as the only adult in the room because I don't want you to have my endorsement on this, asshole, and because you are asking entirely too goddamn much of our friendship considering just how heavily you fucked me the last time you had to deal with any conflict."

And if they were getting married in California I wouldn't have to say any of this shit.