On Brotherhood and Needless Noise...

7/16/5: I followed up on this. I also made an important wording change that should have been made the first time.

I started an earlier draft of this that was posted in drunken anger for several hours a few weeks ago. I don't think anyone read it, because it was removed upon sobering. Now, sober (albeit somewhat sleep deprived), is just as good a time to revisit this topic as any. This weekend was our summer Brotherhood Retreat and so some of the things we talked about there are fresh on my mind.

I'm entangled in this war of mutual disrespect. A useless battle of ego, perhaps, but my side is fraught with actual consequences. I also feel like I'm being back into a losing corner, and have several times been quite close to doing something drastic.

This person I'm having the feud with thinks he is better than me. He thinks that he magically has control. I've had to make threats to even get him to listen to me. Worse, he has no sense of balance in his use of music (my immediate problem) and alcohol (his long term problem, in my opinion). He's in fact the second worst underage alcoholic I've known, and doing his best to "improve" his ranking. It's a bad college cliche, really, and it appears that he thinks his problematic alcoholism and "partying" makes him better than me. I don't want to get drunk and hang out with the same girls every weekend. Is that really all that anti-social and "uncool"? I'm I turning into just "the old complaining guy"? Personally, I see it more as attempting to better "maintain my self-respect by proper conduct at all times", but then what do ...