I'm finally giving up.

I've spent the last 6+ months of my life beating my head against a brick wall and trying (pardon the mixed metaphors) to keep the fraying thread of my friendship with Joseph from snapping. I finally realized it's never going to work until he wants to come to me. So that's it. Now I wait. Perhaps forever.

So what precipitated this final turnabout?

In a word, "its."

We'll move backward a few days. I was chatting with him on IRC and at some point, in the IRC channel, he once again, as he frequently does (as those of you who've read anything he types can attest) used "it's" to mean the possessive of '"it," which you may know is actually not punctuated at all and is hence spelled "its."

Now I know this is hardly an earth-shaking problem, but it's always been my number one language pet peeve. I've mentioned it to him on a number of occasions and always gotten brushed off, then ignored it for another few months before mentioning it again.

So I says to the guy, I says, "And for God's sake, PLEASE please please stop using 'it's' when you mean 'its.'" I followed on by saying it looked ignorant.

Oops.

Apparently I was mistaken when I thought that our relations had improved sufficiently that I could rib him a little.

To cut a long story short, no amount of abasing myself and apologizing for my rudeness (and I again acknowledge here I was a bit rude -- a bit of miscalculation on my part) have had any effect. He seems largely to be of the opinion that by offering this correction, I was proving, finally and incontrovertably, that I really do consider myself better than him.

What complete and utter bullshit. Maybe I shouldn't have corrected him, maybe I shouldn't have taken that particular moment for some mild ribbing. But let's get real. Do any of you guys out there think I was setting myself above him as a person, over some little matter of grammar? Because after much give and take, it became apparent that he was pointing to this as emblematic of an overinflated ego.

So then the other night (one or two days after the initial explosion) immediately following yet another bout of attempting to apologize via Yahoo! Messenger (as he had since completely cut off all communication with me on IRC [which brings up another interesting point ... not satisfied with a simple '/ignore', he's quite pleased with himself for having adapting a system of scripting that basically tosses out the window anything with my IRC nick in it before his client even comes into play]), some lines of our conversation get posted to the IRC channel.

Those of you familiar with IRC will know that it's quite common to misdirect communication intended for a private conversation into the public channel. And those of you who know me well, especially in an online context, know that the one thing I hate more than anything else in terms of online chatting is when private conversations I've had with others get quoted in public or to others in their conversations.

I also know that it is not uncommon for Joseph to vent his frustrations with me to his friends, either in chat or in restricted-access livejournal entries. While these irritate me because I have no idea what's being said about me and hence cannot defend myself against it (which incidentally is specifically why I have made the conscious decision to leave this post public), I really can't do anything about it.

Anyway, put these disparate threads together and you can see where I might suspect that he's quoting from our conversation to someone else and accidentally misdirecting his messages to the public channel.

Angered by the possibility, I call him on it by Yahoo! message.

When he finally gets his computer working the next day, he tells me that his computer decided to stop operating properly, and must have randomly spilled the buffer into the channel, that he spent the evening trying to fix it, and, in short, that my suspicion and accusation was untrue. He wasn't quite that polite, though. And he was much, much angrier even than before.

I doubt even an e-mail would get through to him now. I'm sure I'm on his mail server's spammer list or something else similar to keep my foul electrons from sullying his computer.

I felt bad for a few moments, and tried to apologize for making what was clearly an untrue accusation. I don't know if he ever read the apology or if he even cares to any longer.

But I'm sick and tired of it. I've always held him in the highest esteem. In the months since our breakup I've had to defend him countless times against people who feel he treated me unfairly in our relationship (a subject on which I remain neutral since it's pointless anymore). I've never counted myself above him. I've been polite, cheery and friendly for months in the face of his rudeness, gruffness and curtness and his insults. I've tried at every turn to be his friend.

We've had our arguments, even in the last few months, and some of them severe. But we recognized largely that they came about because two people who've been as close as we have know better than anyone else where those buttons are and how to push them. And we were so very, very close to finally being friends, I think.

But fuck it.

No more screaming at the sky. No more pushing the rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again.

And no more apologies. Even if I do screw up, even if I am at fault. And especially no more apologies for being right.