Dropping out over dinner

All my life I have carefully protected a basic belief in people, in the essential goodness of human nature.  I’ve always bought the idea that people act in the best way they can, given the choices they see themselves as having.  Of course, I’ve always admitted that they can make terrible mistakes in the choices they see, and so that is what leads to evil.  That, essentially, it’s stupidity rather than malevolence.
I’m not so sure any more.

I’ve had a tendency to be withdrawn for most of my adult life.  I enjoy my own company, not because I find myself particularly entertaining, but because a lot of things I find useful and pleasurable, I can do alone.  Reading, writing, making music, thinking: they’re all essentially solitary pursuits, at least the way I pursue them.

But I’ve always liked people and I’ve always followed my impulse to socialise whenever it occurs.

Take last night.  I had some friends and acquaintances to dinner.  I went to a lot of trouble.  I enjoy cooking, I find it relaxing and I can let my mind loose on other topics while I’m doing it. And I like the pleasure that imaginative and well made food can give to people.

Somehow, last night became a tipping point for me when this microcosm of society around my table revealed themselves to me as seven selfish, uncaring, unconnected creatures who were not at all in tune with my idea of people coming together to be together, to exchange ideas and share simple pleasures.

It began when someone I have for years considered one of my closest friends made it clear that he was going to spend the evening in boorish self-aggrandisement and exhibitionism aimed at making a hook-up for the night with another guest.  She was a newcomer to the group and made it clear that the attention was not welcome.  He was undeterred, and continued to create a series of unpleasant and embarrassing moments.

The object of his attention, after several polite attempts to deflect his attentions, went on the defensive with a series of distractions.  These included very insensitive observations on three other guests and a string of criticisms of my lifestyle.  I had met her for the first time, fairly briefly, through a mutual friend a couple of days before.

By now I was feeling rather cynical, which opened me to an objective appraisal of how everyone else was behaving.  Suddenly I began to see them as simply out to score points off one another, and me, as cheaply as they could, and never mind the collateral damage.

But it was the person at the table for whom I felt the most sympathy who eventually threw the last straw on the camel’s back.  He’s a guy who’s been having a rough time in life lately.  It’s one of those disaster stories where he lost his job, lost his partner, his parents both died within months of each other and he generally went into collapse.  Unfortunately he was prescribed one of the sledgehammer drugs of modern medicine, I think it was Xanax or some other strong benzodiazepine, and he went out of control on it, unable to live without an ever-increasing dosage.  Eventually the doctors cut him off and he descending to buying the stuff at street level, with all the trashing of his life that inevitably follows.  He’s been on the way back up for a while, back under a doctor’s care with much lower doses of the drug as he is being slowly weaned off it.

Last night this guy was having a crisis.  It was a crisis that would have been better dealt with in the company of a couple of close friends, rather than in a mixed group of people who didn’t all know him well.  Perhaps it was the tension rising around the table, or some totally unwarranted criticism of him by another guest, but he apparently slipped himself an extra dose of his “medication” between courses and then went out of control.

The evening finished with a near fist-fight, a vicious verbal altercation between two guests and the whole group taking sides over the general attitude to my drug-dependent friend while he was throwing up all over my carpet.

I think that was my last dinner party.  Ever.

And it more or less crystallised for me the reason I’m giving up on people.  In the end, the only fair treatment and honest conversation I can find is among my inner voices, whenever I can get in touch with them. Outside my head, life is pointless and anarchic and dog-eat-dog.

I resign.