Lives Intersect And We Just Move On

Recently, Ray Liotta passed away. Which got me thinking a bit about his brother Kevin who did not exist.

Kevin Liotta was a character on the TV show Just Shoot Me. Introduced as the mailroom guy “Kevin” he later mentions in passing that he is Ray’s brother. Ray makes an appearance on the show.

Kevin Liotta was an absolutely great character who livened up the show. It worked in part because of how organically the character grew into the series.

During season six, though, he was suddenly dropped from the show. The producers wanted to add an actress (Rena Sofer) to the cast and more-or-less forced the writers to come up with a character for her (Vicki Costa). To make room for her they more-or-less abandoned Kevin. The audiences hated the new character for a variety of reasons. The writers never knew what to do with her, and while Kevin grew into the series organically she was entirely forced. They dumped her after half a season and brought Kevin back.

Except that it wasn’t the same. I don’t know if it was that the character’s absence and reintroduction ruined the rhythm and flow or whether the character had simply run its course and was actually due to be replaced anyway. I have mostly come around to the view that Kevin, being amusing and one-dimensional, was probably a character that was best used with a limited shelf-life.

Around the time I watched that show straight through, I also watched Becker. In the first season a character named Bob was introduced. Bob was a loser in high school that had made good and felt that his success should have made Reggie, a former model who landed as the proprietor of a crummy diner, feel regret over rejecting him. He was a good character. For half a season. The problem is that they kept him around for five, well past the point that he was remotely interesting. For the last season they replaced him with another character named Hector (played by Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley on Lost). I wish they’d added Hector a whole lot sooner.

As with so many things, art can correspond with life in general.

One of the things I used to take pride in was that I was on good terms with almost every ex-girlfriend I’d had. It ceased being workable in the cases of the two most significant old flames, though, for different reasons. And it turned out that was… fine. It is good that none of the involved harbor hate in their hearts, but beyond that the nature of our relationship was predicated on their being a relationship. In one case, the disequilibrium that defined our time together was almost certain to disturb any attempt at friendship. In the other case, we had grown in different directions and the elements of our personalities that attracted us to one another diminished over time. That, too, is fine.

I also think about friendships lost along the way. In some cases it was just a gradual drifting apart and in others there was a blow-up of sorts. Even in the latter case, however, in retrospect I mostly see friendships that lacked foundation, or had already been subject to wayward drifting prior to the detonation. I regret that things turned out acrimoniously where they did, and I genuinely wish them well in their future endeavors, but I do not lament their absence in my life. In each case if I had met them tomorrow with no history between us we probably wouldn’t be friends. Our history was the foundation, and once that was lost through conflict, there was nothing really to salvage. That is also fine.

It’s easier to accept, of course, when old friends are replaced by new. As such, it does become more of a problem for people like me who have difficulty making offline friends. A lot of the stupid cases where I was ready to call a friendship off or whatever way back when involved a time in my life (aka college) when gaps were easy to fill. Without that, it becomes too easy to try to hold on to the cast list you have even when it doesn’t really serve anybody’s interest. Enough that I have come to view the difficulty of letting go of some relationships – not just ones of interpersonal compatibility but ones which leaned heavily on living somewhere I no longer do – as a symptom of a need for new ones.

This post has gone a long way off from Kevin Liotta, but one of the important things in life is to recognize the some people are meant to have a limited role in your life, for a limited time. This is perhaps one of the things that comes more naturally – perhaps unthinkingly – to people who connect well with others. But as with many things, it’s a lesson I have had to learn more expressly.

Some of this piece was adapted from an old post on my old site Hit Coffee. In the coming weeks and months I intend to be contributing more frequently to Ordinary Times, perhaps on a daily basis if I can find that groove. Hit Coffee veered pretty far away from the political and towards the personal and philosophical. More of my writing here will be along these lines (though usually not as personal as this one) as my views of politics have been exhausted to a degree. In honor of the old site, they will be categorized under Hit Coffee. If you’re here for the political stuff, it should be pretty easy to skip over.