QotD: My Best Friend

What makes your best friend so special? 
Submitted by Jessmiloo.

I consider that I have two best friends (both of whom read this blog and will hate reading about themselves, I imagine, so sgazzetti and Itchy Dawg, bugger off for a while).  They are quite different people.

I met Itchy a long damn time ago--14 years or so ago, when I was a wee, wild lass.  I don't remember exactly how we first met, whether I met him first through someone else and then he invited me to those poetry circles, or if I went to the poetry circles with someone else and met Itchy there.  Anyway, poetry was the thing.  We both love poetry.  We wrote it (Itchy still does, and he writes it very well; I never was good at it anyway, and I don't write it much anymore), we read it, we talked about it.  He was about the only one of the other people who went there that I could really stand, as he was the only one who wasn't completely silly--silly in a bad way, like silly in a way that they say totally pretentious shit and then you can't ever take them seriously again.  That's one of the things that makes Itchy so special:  His total lack of pretension.  He is not extroverted or talkative, yet he invited me to spend the nights of the poetry circles on his couch.  It's a long story, but I had no way to get home after them, so until he invited me to use his couch, I had to spend them sitting all night long drinking coffee in Hardee's and trying to evade the salacious attention of Neil the Schizophrenic who liked to pepper our "conversations" with monologues about his admiration for rebar (yes, rebar) and how "horny" I made him.  It was not pleasant, and Itchy saved me from that, and I reckon that makes him pretty fucking special.  I don't know how he put up with me or how he continues to put up with me--I'm really extroverted and talkative, and I always think I must be driving him insane--but somehow we make each other laugh a lot, and we have good talks about books and other arcana, and we continue on as friends after all this time.  I don't know how he could be any more special than that.  Oh, and for some bloody reason, he likes my poetry.  I'm not sure if that makes him special or weird, but it amounts to the same in the end.

Sgazzetti, on the other hand, is a somewhat different kettle of fish.  He's, like, from Maine.  He's a hardy, gregarious, seafaring type and drinks a lot and taught me to appreciate the many subtleties of single-malt Scotch ("OK, this one tastes like medicinal gauze").  He talks a lot and guffaws boisterously.  He throws Danish-themed parties and uses Scots English words in normal conversation.  He's been a boat-builder, a beer-brewer, a fucking Arabic translator for the motherfucking US Army, and a punk-rockin student of architecture.  He could charm the pants off a line, as they say, although that's probably not what they say in Maine.  Also, when we had to share class after class with this obnoxious wench named Sarah Jo "Motorhead," he kept a "list of grievances" against her that ran to multiple pages (among them:  the gratuitous umlaut she put over a vowel in her last name, her constant eating of foods in crinkly wrappers during lectures, her wearing of a fedora a la Kim Carnes, etc.).  Every Wednesday, instead of a poetry circle, he had me over for South Park and gin, a delightful combination.  Usually, after South Park, we'd keep going with the gin and put on some XTC or something and just talk and laugh and get steaming drunk.  I think all of the above makes him pretty special, but my favorite part is the Danish-themed parties.  Skaal for Satan!  Yeah!

It's not that Itchy isn't charming--he is, if you can get him to talk.  And it isn't that sgazzetti isn't highly literate and articulate about poetry and stuff--he is that, too.  I think if you got them together, they'd get along just fine, actually, although you never really know.  But I think they're both pretty neat.