# Chapter 312

The death of a non-friend. As often happens with people who are simply way smarter than the rest of us, he was socially very awkward. In the extreme. He was a couple of years younger than me, but way way smarter than me, and impossible to talk to, converse with, be around, one of the most uncomfortable humans I have ever spent any time with, and I am pretty sure we all bored him immensely, yet he wanted our approval and admiration more than he wanted his next breath. He wanted respect and honor without giving any, he wanted love and high regard without being very loving or lovable, and the only regard he gave someone was because they were male. Unfortunately for him, he had a wife and three daughters and that caused him the same challenges that my brother experienced because of his low view of womankind. Why is it that men who have only daughters are these kinds of men? Perhaps I am generalizing too much, but it doesn’t feel like I am. Both of my daughters didn’t want to spend a single moment with my non-friend nor my brother.

I tried to be a friend, and I think I can converse with any human on the planet and one of my superpowers is context-switching - talking to an uneducated laborer one moment, and physician the next - but being a friend to this man was impossible even for me. I barely survived the occasional encounters that life foist upon us. He was black hole on life, sucking away all the parts that make this journey precious and important, probably because he was so brilliant and needy. Yet his death has weighed heavily on me, so much unrealized talent gone to waste, so insistent he was on making it about him. I always fear that I am only a few steps removed from being someone just like him, and that scares me to death.