OH SNAP

You'll probably see Snap pop up pretty frequently.  She's pretty damn important to me, and a lot of the weirdness that I encounter gets filtered through her perspective.

I am one of the only people who can walk into Snap's house without calling or knocking.

Snap is one of the only people who can call me before 9:00 AM without getting a shiny new asshole ripped open.

Snap can loan me money and know she'll get paid back.

I can buy things for Snap when she's broke and know that she won't take advantage, that when I'm down and out, she'll take care of me.

These sound like basic things to some people, but when you've called con-artists "friend", you don't take stuff like that for granted.

So Snap, my hype-girl, this one's for you.

Snap and I have been friends in some form or another for years.  She is one of the very few female friends I have, my best friend aside from The Beau.  Fate twisted and turned a bit to ensure this epic meeting of minds would happen.

I had an incarcerated boyfriend who managed to convince me to cut ties with my friends (because they were "bad for me") and my family (because they "didn't understand me"), but was completely comfortable with me spending time with his family.  Not his friends, though, they were almost all guys (who'd try to fuck me), drug-dealers (guys who'd try to fuck me), and/or drug-buying clientele (guys who'd try to fuck me).  Why yes, he WAS a drug dealer with serious jealousy issues, why do you ask?

Before we go any further, I should add (as you've probably guessed) that the incarcerated boyfriend in question was adept in the art of abuse in all three of the known forms - mental, emotional, and physical.  He was probably abusive in some ways as of yet unknown by the psychological community.  I found being in an abusive relationship is like being in a nightmare...it's horrifying, but you just can't seem to realize that if you wake up you can move on with your life.

Anyway, back to the genesis of the great bond between Tae and Snap.  Since he encouraged me to have regular contact with his family, I became friends with his sisters, especially one named Filch.  Filch seemed like the best kind of friend.  She was always there for me, whether it be to make me laugh away the tears incarcerated boyfriend always seemed to incite, or to shoplift things for me while I bought scented lotions at Bath and Body Works.  She'd wash my sink-full of dishes while I scrubbed my bathroom.  That's not a metaphor either; she literally did my dishes, all the time.  The problem was, Filch had sticky fingers and -oh yeah- a pain-killer addiction.  Long story short, the bitch still owes me close to a grand.

At the time, Snap was another one of the marks/enablers that Filch called friends.  I liked Snap from the first time I met her.  She was a little flaky around the edges, but filled with warm sweet generosity, a fresh-baked Tastykake pie of a gal.  Snap shared Filch's pain-killer addiction (well, hell, so did I and everyone else I knew), but not her proclivity for manipulating and stealing whatever she wanted.  Snap and I became friendly, but not close.  And so time passed.

Eventually, I came to my senses, dumped the incarcerated boyfriend (post-incarceration) and stopped letting Filch take advantage of me (aka, cutting the bitch off).  I didn't really see Snap very much, but one of us would call the other from time to time to catch up.  Eventually, Snap kicked Filch out of her life as well, and then, in truest female form, we bonded while picking apart the bones of our mutual enemy.  There were some drugs mixed up in it too, but we both finally managed to pull our heads out of our asses and stop.

Mind you, when I say there were some drugs mixed up in it too, I mean that we've seen each other at our absolute most down-and-out worst.  I've seen Snap after five days of not sleeping, not knowing who anyone was, alternately crying and shrieking.  Snap has seen me straddling her toilet backwards with my pants around one ankle, nodded out with my head on the tank, insensible.  Most times, people don't maintain a friendship once they're clean and past that kind of behavior.  It can be hard to look someone in the eye, knowing they've seen you like that.  Snap and I not only can look each other in the eye, we can giggle about it now, turning it into mutual strength of conviction to keep from returning to that place in our lives.  Instead of living the weirdness, we laugh and tell stories about it.

This was originally supposed to be a story about how I put Snap's 10 year old daughter in a choke-hold and dragged her up the stairs when she refused to go to bed, but I'll save that for another time.