(old) I want to care but don't seem to know how

Isaac is my friend because he doesn't really listen to me, and that's okay. It's not very easy to listen to me when I start one of my ravings, but he just carries on in his own way, nodding or hmmm-ing while making tea, washing the dishes or getting stoned on that green weed of which I disapprove.

Most of my family and friends don't let me talk. We converse, but this is different. We converse about weather, Blair, traffic, my job, their holidays, my lack of a girlfriend, but they don't let me talk about America.

I say, The only good kind of football is American football.
And they say, Shut it Nathan, I'm watching the match.

I'm easily annoyed, according to my doctor. He is a very old man who smokes in his surgery, and I don't like his smell. When not refusing to prescribe me some more pills, he grumbles about the NHS and how things apparently ought to be. I've told him that we should have private health insurance because that's what the Americans have and they like it just fine. He doesn't let me talk now.

Here in crummy London there are only three types of people:

1. People who roll their eyes at America while copying it in every way
2. People who rave about the great evil or devil of America, but have no courage of their conviction
3. People who realise that America has it right

London isn't a real city. Real cities have culture and a character of their own, but London doesn't have that. It's a city of mirrors. Everything in the city is either a mirror of the past, like the Tower, the Queen, Downing Street, or a mirror of something American, like Canary Wharf, the people and the food. Whatever becomes cool in New York eventually becomes cool in London.

Isaac lets me talk all this out for hours. He likes London, he says, but he's happy as long as I'm happy. Isaac likes to listen to music, paint and draw pretty pictures while I talk. He only ever paints animals and things in the wild because he says that it reflects the true character of the world. I think he's actually does it because he likes to watch David Attenborough and can't get mouths and eyes right. When I've told him this, he's just smiled and continued to draw a scene. His latest is a leopard being eaten alive by an antelope.

A bearded NHS counsellor that I saw for a few weeks when I was depressed last winter tells me that it's good to have a friend who can just listen. He smiled a wan I want to care but don't seem to know how smile while saying it. Many of my people of them are expert at that smile. He told me to talk to Isaac whenever I could. It's good to talk.