Honest Dick.

From the moment Gus clocked in today, I knew it was going to be a day filled to the brim with nonstop bitching, and indeed it was. I want to be patient with him, but my patience has worn thin. I have enough bitching going on in my own cranium, and while I will often express that frustration verbally, I typically prefer to do it through the medium of writing.

Writing is less intrusive than speaking. If you don’t like a piece of writing, you don’t have to read it. If you don’t like what someone has to say or how they’re saying it, though, you don’t exactly have a mute button.

My kingdom of emptiness and nothing for a goddamn mute button.

Gus has often told me, when I finally turn to him and bitch about his bitching, that he needs to bitch because if he keeps it in, he’ll explode, but his constant bitching constitutes rapid machine gunfire no one can escape. It doesn’t seem much better. And its always about the same stupid shit and the intensity of his emotional spree killing never depletes, not a fucking smidgen. So how is it helping?

So today, back by the sink, I try to enlighten him to the fact that he is indeed being a dick. That he never gives anyone a chance, never observes, never questions, just labels them and then he feels justified in talking to them in a bitter manner. Then he says it. The shit that I’m tired of with him more than anything.

“I’m not a dick,” Gus proclaims, “I’m honest.”

Personally, I’ve grown rather tired of this line, which several have thrown my way over the course of my life.

I look at it in this way:

Communication is about contents, packaging, and delivery. Contents are what you think or feel or percieve and desire to convey. Packaging involves the articulation of these contents in words. Delivery is the manner in which you transmit those words to others.

Honesty only requires sincere contents — not bullshit, not lies, not things intended to deceive and manipulate another. And for all I know, Gus is being honest. His issue is with packaging and delivery. It is his default style of packaging and delivery that makes him a dick.

“I’m not a dick, I’m just honest…”

Bullshit.

The truth of the matter is that this isn’t an either/or circumstance. You can be honest and be a dick simultaneously, Gus, and if you can’t help but be a dick when you’re honest, then you’re honestly just a dick.