I had a lot of loser friends in High School. This was so because I was awkward and therefore not among the popular ones. One or two of my friends were truly good people. Paul H. comes to mind. However, most were not.
Of my High School friends, one stands out as the biggest loser of them all. I say this not in reference to how his life turned out. As best I can tell, it turned out well. In a society where sleaze, greed, duplicity, backstabbing, and shallowness pay off, a person like Jim C. is likely to do well. Don't get me wrong, he didn't do spectacularly well, but he did OK for a person of less than impressive intelligence and a complete lack of understanding of anything worth knowing. Jim, as you might have guessed, is a banker. Bankers are only marginally intelligent people. They create nothing. They contribute in no way to the world. They are nothing more than parasites, not unlike tapeworms.
I don't intend to go into great detail about Jim, especially his negative qualities (which are pretty much all he has). I am writing this to thank him. You see, Jim saved me from marrying an unintelligent sociopath. He did this by giving me bad advice. Jim was determined to steal my fiancee away from me, back in 1982. He fed me lots of bad relationship advice while secretly convincing my fiancee that he was trying to help her relationship with me. When she wanted me to give her more breathing room, he told me she wanted me to give her more attention. When she wanted me to go slower, and told him this, he told me that when women say “No” they mean “Yes” (I'm not kidding about this). He had his sister, a friend of my fiancee, pump lies and disparaging remarks to my fiancee. By following his advice, I broke her heart, she dumped me and then he took her away from me. Along the way I should have known what he was up to, but I have never been good at detecting false friends. I did not realize just how much he played us until I spoke with my ex-fiance many years later. Her view of me and my intentions were 180 degrees off, thanks to his brainwashing. She even came to believe I was many years older than her when I was not, in fact I am younger than Jim. She came to believe I was from Texas when I was from her neighboring town. How she went from knowing my age and origin to having false beliefs about such basic things is beyond me. However, in that conversation with her, I also found that she had a shallow understanding of religion, that she was anti-intellectual, and that she bought the deceptions of this false friend wholesale. Had I stayed with her, I might have ended up married to her. He saved me from a life of being chained to an unintelligent woman with anger issues. Thanks Jim. I owe you.
