TwoFace Book

There is this guy here in town who is a VERY good friend of a VERY good friend of mine. We have often been at the same small events and I’ve even been to his home a couple of times.

The problem is, whenever I run into him when our mutual friend isn’t present, he refuses to acknowledge my existence. At first, I would say “Hi, FriendofFriend!” He would look at me like, "Who the fuck are you?" Like he’d never laid eyes on me before. He would sort of haltingly say, “hello” with the most abject confusion in his voice.

And the truth is, I wasn't really interested in a relationship of any kind with him. I just was being social because of our mutual friend. So finally, I stopped even bothering to greet him, and settled for complaining about what a douche he was to our mutual friend.

Recently, I saw him at a small, political function. I was LITERALLY 18 inches from him. He looked directly into my eyes and there was absolutely no recognition. I was a stranger in a crowd. It didn’t really bother me. It was behavior I had come to expect.

So imagine how hard my dentures hit the floor when, last week, I got a friend request from said douche on Facebook.

You should know that when I first got on Facebook I was ecstatic. The competitive edge came out and I wanted to link to as many “friends” as possible. Soon, I realized that I had overindulged (how unlike me!) and had linked to a lot of folks that sort of fell into that “better off dead” category. You know, people you remember fondly, occasionally wondering, “Whatever happened to . . .” Well, now you know. And there was a reason your friendship lives in the past tense.

But this was new territory. How could I be friends with someone who refused to acknowledge my very presence in the same room. And why would I want to be friends with someone who exudes all the personality of a non-flowering shrub. Snarky lil ol’ me wanted to send a response. Something along the lines of “you’re fucking kidding, right?” or “did you mean to send this to someone else?” or even, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

But instead, I just gleefully, and perhaps with a hair too much might, punched the “ignore” button. After all, he’d been punching my ignore button for quite some time now. And I have to admit, I feel smugly superior all of a sudden.