The Big Smooch, or how acquaintances, friends, and "other"s come to want to have nothing to do with each other.

The kiss off is nothing new. The forms in which it is rendered change, and the sophistication with which it is justified grows, but all in all the kiss off has been with is for a long ass time. There are personal kiss offs, in which relationships are cut off; and cultural kiss offs, in which institutional cultural values are jettisoned; and the political kiss off, in which ideas, policies or the individuals in which they are held become something of an embarrassment, a thing to be gotten rid of (Trent Lott, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader in ’08).

It seems the kiss off and the wandering twenties go hand in glove. We seek to distance ourselves from those who remind us of what we are not, and will never be. We cultivate an aversion to the notion that people acquainted with our past selves have perspicuous access to what we’ve become. They just don’t/can’t/won’t understand the immediate exigencies we face. We have bills, girlfriends, boyfriends, incommunicable illnesses and other imminent obstacles that prevent us from continuity. Sometimes it comes as a response to boredom, to the inevitable “growing apart.” So why bother with unreconstructed pieces and unspoken alliances? Both mean nothing. We do what we did before, and the assumption that newness is possible bogs us down in the familiarity of our habitat. So. The kiss off. It comes unbidden, and it leaves one with the release succumbing to abandonment brings. It is often just, a natural outgrowth of calcium depletion and marginal returns upon our infinite potential. It is often healthy – a jarring departure from the familiar aches and pains, a release from the detrimental and the disturbing, and if nothing else it is this: an adamant refusal to accept stasis. It says: “We have only just begun, and still there is nothing to be said, shared or solidified that isn’t self-effacingly banal, so here I am and there you are: off we go in search of respective, discretely individuated selves. Merry Christmas, and to all, a good life.”