With Friends Like These Vol IV

Something I learned a long time ago was that despite our age, despite everyone getting older, apparently growing up is entirely optional. And with that, maturing is also optional. Growing up beyond the high school mentality so many people take into their adult lives just never seems to happen for some.

How often have we, as adults, dealt with a friend or acquaintance who still, despite their age, behaved like a spoiled child. Or worse a vengeful, spiteful, attention seeker?  

I've dealt with countless instances since high school where someone who claimed to be a friend would gleefully drop the dime, throw the rat, pass along any negative information to another person saying that I did or said whatever. Gossip, plain and simple. It has nothing to do with the gossiping person but they love the drama that comes from it and they somehow feel vindicated by ratting out other people.

I could literally rattle off dozens and dozens of former friends who did this exact same thing to me over the years. People who claim to be my friend but if I were to say anything, not even negative, just a mild critique of someone, they would go running to the person I spoke of and say "Louie said this and that about you!"  So it's no surprise that it continues to happen to this day.

But what a lot of these people don't understand, what they truly fail to grasp, is that I caught on to this game so long ago that I use this gossipy person to my advantage. Oh didn't see that coming did you? What I have gotten into the habit of doing, when fishermen go out hunting shark they have this technique called chumming the water where they throw out bits of flesh, blood, whatever in the hopes of attracting a shark. They are literally drawing the shark to the surface by giving them exactly what they want. So I've done this multiple times over the years and nobody seems to catch on where I will intentionally say something negative about a person, subject, what have you. Sometimes I'll even get creative and tell different people different things just for the purpose of seeing which of these comments get back to the person I initially said it about. I'm chumming the water and at the same time the gossip is outing themselves by passing along whatever it was I said about the person. 

I've done this before with the same group of people, you think one of them would have eventually caught on? 

That means it happened recently with these handful of stories that I just shared this week.

So thank you for being exactly that "friend" I figured you would be.