Bartender, make it a double

There are days when I wish I could drink.

Today is one of those days.

A friend's numerous question life decisions seem like they're finally catching up with him.  Friend is rapidly running out of options, mostly financially, and this is starting to have emergency-room-level consequences on his health.  Friend is looking at losing quite literally everything he owns in 30-60 days (happy new year).

Friend sees me as the only person who can stop this.  I've done this before, in other instances of the same situation - at least, from his perspective.  From mine, it's been totally different.  Still, I can tell he believes I can do it and that it's my duty to do it.

I can't do it.  I've damn near destroyed myself doing it before, and I had far less going on then.  I can't go through this again.  But he's also right, because if I don't, there isn't any other person who will.  If I don't do it, and he doesn't get really lucky really fast (which isn't likely), he's SOL.

This is complicated by a lot of factors.  I've had a lot go right in my life - and some decently horrendous wrong, to be fair, but by and large most people would be envious.  A lot of that "going right" can be tied back to various levels of privilege and some simple luck.  Friend has had a lot go wrong in his life, especially since I've known him, and that places a social burden on me to try and even the score, as it were.

At the same time, though, friend has had a whole lot of opportunities and has generally botched most of them - at least a few times because he was trying to game the system and get even more.  Friend has a sense of entitlement that rivals any political aristocracy: he feels, quite literally, that the world owes him success and comfort simply because he's "brilliant".  He's never had a "real" job, so he has no unemployment or social security coming - he flat-out refuses to acknowledge that "self-employment taxes" (the SDI and SSI you pay when self-employed) exist and so has never paid anything towards them.  I'm not even sure if he could qualify for state supplemental, because he's been getting paid under the table for years and they might discover that (anyone who can do a little math would discover it).

So I'm caught between several feelings: angry that he's in this situation, frustrated with him for trying to put it all on me, duty-bound to help him, really annoyed for feeling like I'm duty-bound to risk everything to help him...

And now, the stress from all this has resulted in him ending up in the emergency room.

Like I said, I need a drink.  Because tomorrow he's going to ask, and I'm going to say no, and it's going to be ugly, but that's the only answer I can give.

He reminds me of Guildenstern: "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."  But I will not play Rosencrantz.  I know better this time.