Ran

Keeps running from some old concept to some new concept that resembles the old just enough for one to be affectionate to it. I hated my father so I looked for another father to represent my own, but just enough to catch the finer points of the concept without having to deal with the detrimental details. Eventually if I believed enough things would be better, somehow they would have to be, until I start realizing that conceding and settling are two sides of the same coin.
If I ran enough, long enough on the same road I'd have to come to some kind of stop that would become familiar as I let myself accept it. If I continue the same pattern that came before, things must invariably change. Breaking the wall by knocking through it; like chipping away stone with a river. Things are bound to be altered by following the same course, if you can stay the path just a couple hundred miles.
Turnabout works the same angles in reverse. Run from the concept and you romanticize it by removing it as a possibility. Nobody really runs from connections except the dead and the living dead. Everyone else plays at solitude for posturing, acting as if self-flagellation somehow inflates their ego. Self defense is as easy as keeping yourself safe until you realize you cut yourself off from everything you intended, and nothing feels quite so nice as a life hermetically sealed. I'd take a moment to spit on it if I didn't pause to realize that I'm sitting behind a screen just like everyone else.
The Punchline: accept it. Deflect criticisms, quit playing yourself for a rube and try to avoid as many fairy tales as possible.

There is no attempted ideology behind all of this. I am frustrated and in love with the world in front of me, and everyone I keep in it.

p.s.-no more free meals! Either I pay, you pay, and we all eat or we all go hungry...