I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by flakiness…….

Man, why are so many people in this city flakes? Why do people think it's okay to flake? Why can't people actually commit to something they say they're gonna do or at least take responsibility for not doing so? (editor’s note- at this point I am legally required by the Legal Department to state that not everyone has this problem and to state that there are plenty of upstanding responsible, non-flaky citizens).

And no, it's not like I'm perfect and that I've never had bouts of flakiness, but the older I get, the less I flake. It's that whole getting older and wiser thing. Not to mention the learning over and over again how much it sucks to be flaked on. It also means that I have a lot less patience for people who flake. I'm older now and my friends are older and I figure that by now, people have learned that doing things like not returning phone calls and e-mails, or answering questions, or meeting you when they say they'll meet you is kind of lame.

Let's take, for instance, Exhibit A of this kind of behavior. This happened over the weekend. I went to the Giants game on Saturday. Someday, maybe, I'll write about what a great time it was and how it was totally worth the $120 I spent to go even if it was the only game the Giants lost, but not now (gonna lay off the baseball stuff for awhile since I'm probably the one who cares). Before the game, I met up with friends to have a few drinks and we made plans to meet up after the game. Game ends, I'm all happy and tired and kind of sick from way too much garlic fries and go to the place where we're supposed to meet. I kind of want to just go home so I can get ready to go out that night with friends, but I said I'd meet them and I don't flake about things like this (see the whole it being lame thing). Besides, if something happened, it'd probably be a lot of fun because the people are a lot of fun. So I trudge on out to the meeting spot and wait. And wait. And wait some more. And for all that waiting, I got bupkus. Nothing. Nobody came. So, after standing around for fifteen or twenty minutes, vowing to myself the whole time that I'll never eat an entire thing of garlic fries by myself, I went home.

This is what is considered the classic flake- the not following through on something promised (flake, of course, comes from the Latin word "Flakimus," meaning "one whose head is stuck up their butt. For example, in the "Illiad" Odysseus tells Agamemnon that Achilles is a great warrior but that they’d all be able to get the hell out of Troy if it weren't for him being a huge Flakimus). Sometimes when this happens, you get an apology. Usually, however, you don't. In this case, I got the "dude, sometimes things just happen." Notice no actual use of the word "sorry" or any other sort of word that would convey the same thing. Well, you know what also happens? People spend fifteen to twenty minutes sitting around, wasting their time for no particular reason and feeling like sa total schlub because they got flaked on.

Having been a flaker, or more like an ex-flaker, I know exactly what happened. Either I was forgotten about, which is kind of lame, or I was thought of and then the decision was made to forget about me. Which is even lamer. The pisser of it all is that I know that when word is relayed that I was kind of pissed about the thing, I'm pretty sure the whole thing's gonna get a shrug of the shoulders and an "oh well." As if nothing wrong was done.

With flaking, it's almost expected. Hell, in a lot of ways, it's accepted. I've never quite figured out whether it's the whole Gen-X "whatever" thing, the listening to way too much "Free to Be You and Me" when we were kids thing, or the whole "hang loose" California thing, but whatever it is, it's the grease that every social wheel runs on. Or, more like, runs in spite of.

In most flake situations, it's usually like the person whose in the wrong isn't the flaker, but the flakee. The flakee, of course, is the one with the problem because they're upset at the flaker for flaking. I know because I've gotten pissed at people who flaked, which made them pissed at me because I was pissed off about them flaking, which made me pissed off that they got pissed off about me getting pissed off about them flaking. Because as we all know, the worst thing you can do to someone in this city is to make them actually take responsibility for something. Because the worst thing you can do to someone is actually hassle someone.

Sometimes I wonder how this society actually works anymore. On the other hand, can anyone say our society is really working anyways?