day 2

cheetah was still not talking to me today

somewhere around mid-afternoon i telegrammed him while he was out to say i miss him and i’m waiting for him to want to share parts of his life with me again

somewhere around evening he did some deeper cooking than he usually does. but he declined to offer me any, and we’ve been fighting so much over food i didn’t feel comfortable even asking

so somewhat after that, i was a little more direct about starting a conversation. it became an argument immediately of course. all the usual points were covered. finally he left with his bike

he really wants to blame me being on weed for being the root cause of this whole argument

i tried to emphasize that i’m trying to talk out issues, as clearly as i can, and he’s getting mad at me for it. i maintain it feels like the root problem is that i have opinions at all and he doesn’t like that. he maintains my opinions don’t matter because they are unreasonable

i don’t know

is it unreasonable to expect gratitude when we help each other out?

should i just try to accept that cheetah is incapable of gratitude?

because it really seems like he would rather shut me out of his life than feel trapped into needing to show any kind of appreciation that i’m part of it

we talked in great detail about the coupon example. that horse is dead and needs no more beating. i think i did get across the general gist of my point though

i write talked but it was pure argument. that was another thing i repeated a couple times: it’s good to try to talk to people in their own way. that’s why i am willing to argue with him. nobody else in my life do i need to argue with to talk about deep shit, but cheetah only knows how to talk about deep shit through arguing, so i’m willing to argue with him about shit like this

this concept seems very weird to him, but perhaps not a total miss. i know i’ve told him this before as well

he says it’s weed. he tells me i only would ever want to argue about stuff like this because i’m on weed

so hypothetically, if i didn’t have weed… what?

• i wouldn’t have tried to serve him food across the last while?
  • seems unlikely
• i wouldn’t have been rebuked for it?
  • that part isn’t on me
• i wouldn’t have been hurt by increasingly sharp rebukes?
  • possible i guess?
• i wouldn’t have challenged that i was hurt?
  • also possible i guess?
• that challenge wouldn’t have been a detailed argument with examples and research notes?
  • this part actually seems kind of likely

i wonder what kind of a challenge it would have been?

probably more pussy, to borrow one of his words

random observation: twice in the argument there was a case where he was making a run-on sentence, i’d start to respond to some point of it, and he’d get totally confused because he didn’t have any idea what i was responding to. in the first case i was answering the first part of his claim, in the second case it was the very last few words he’d most recently said

the takeaway is: there are times cheetah literally does not remember his own words from the beginning of his sentence to the end of it

this refines upon earlier observations where cheetah has forgotten his own words between one of his sentences and the next

another thing: lately i’ve been calling it out when he gets mad at me for hypotheticals. like, he’ll be yelling about something that is, then he’ll say “imagine if” or “imagine it’s like” and then start posing a totally hypothetical situation, and then be mad at me for the completely hypothetical behavior he’s assigned me in a situation that really doesn’t have much chance of ever becoming true. so i call out that he’s mad at me for hypotheticals again. i’ve tried to explain this, and the more i try, the more i feel i just confuse him. i have to wonder if he actually can see no difference between something that has happened and something he imagines might happen

fun observation: he repeatedly insists i violate every part of my own code of ethics all the time. it feels like he’s just throwing shit and hoping i’m sensitive. i reply that i would love the discussion if he could point to any part of my operating rules he thinks i’m breaking. but we both know he can’t, because he won’t actually read any of my writings

another question i’d like to ask sometime: why will he not study any schools of thought on how to handle life? like, it’s not just mine he resists learning anything about, it’s all of them

to me it feels like he believes he’s smarter than not just me, but the entire sum of human history, and to suggest there’s any thoughts worth thinking that he hasn’t already thought is an insult to him

but i’m sure he’d have his own reason instead

i wonder if he could ever explain it?