There are times a person feels friendless and alone.
Ironically, tonight this feeling comes after hanging out with a few very good friends. I ran into two friends from the dance scene that I haven’t seen in awhile- a reminder of what I’ve been missing out on over the last few years (another story) and my dad is out of town in Chicago on a trip I was supposed to make, but couldn’t.
I suppose the fact that I was out with my lifting partner listening to a Hank Williams/Johnny Cash/Waylon Jennings tribute band probably added to the feeling of emptiness that is taking over right now.
Just as I feel the drama within me rise, Dylan, my thirteen-year-old battle-scarred pit bull and long-time amigo, rescues me. He misses my dad too. They spend every day together in the office with my Dad at the computer and Dylan resting in the corner.
He whimpers at the door as if wondering what I’m doing here alone. After a second, perhaps realizing it’s just the two of us, he turns toward me – slipping slightly on the smooth wood floor and galumphs sadly over in search of attention.
I gladly oblige.
I don’t know why it is that it’s possible to feel so alone after being with other people. Perhaps it has something to do with a difficulty in relating to them on the whole.
I’m not antisocial mind (neither is Dylan, he’s come by his scars mostly through surgery from cancer); it’s just that I have a different way of seeing the world.
One that many people have a hard time with. I should have realized that this was a likely outcome of following the maxim, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” when I read the apology at age 12. Of course, I was so persuaded by his arguments that stopped reading before the and and I missed out on the most important lessons from Socrates’ apology; namely, that happy endings are rare in the extreme for philosophers.
You see, the unexamined life has a lot less impact on your neighbors. A person who gladly goes through their day without thinking too much about more than their next paycheck doesn’t make people around him think. Except maybe with the odd joke, of course.
This leads me to my next belief: People hate to think. For some reason, laziness I suspect, people hate thinking more than they hate taxes. For proof of this, look at all of the people who take general deductions from the 1040EZ forms the IRS puts out, instead of “bothering” with getting the sum of all of their legitimate deductions.
Think about that. People would rather lose hundreds of dollars per year than take an extra three to four hours to do the thing properly.
This isn’t the only place this happens. Ticketmaster is notorious for overcharging, but because they are convenient, for years they had a defacto monopoly on ticket sales to any major event. Of course, then you don’t have to take the 20 minutes to actually buy the ticket at the venue…
I don’t know if it’s a sign of depression or just of awareness that when I’m with people I want to be alone and when I’m alone I want to be with people. Probably both. I tend to notice things about people that drive me crazy and that they, quite understandably, don’t want to hear.
This doesn’t stop them from complaining however. No, it seems to be another rule of human nature that people want to tell you all about how they can’t get in shape, they can’t meet the right person, their job is terrible or any number of other inconsequential things and they expect you to listen with rapt attention (of course that’s no shock and many people have remarked that a man’s favorite subject is himself), but if you offer solutions to these problems, in most cases the person will jump down your throat protesting that they don’t want to be criticized or that they just wanted to be understood.
Heaven help the person who is not so banal that they wish to discuss something other than celebrity gossip, who is currently fucking whom or you know, the person you’re with.
Do so and you are immediately taken for an insufferable, tasteless, tactless bore for wishing to discuss something other than that person’s favorite subject (see above).
Of course we put up with this. We put up with this because the alternative is worse. A lifetime of the thoughts in your head (admittedly mostly about yourself) whirling around and picking up speed is horrifying.
It takes a chimpanzee only six months of isolation to go completely and irreversibly insane. How researchers are able to discern this, given that they’re studying a species willing to fling its own feces raises some important questions.
How much time does a human being need then? It couldn’t be much more than that, surely, I mean look at the cat ladies of the world. Every community seems to have at least one and often several. Poor souls who are so warped from loneliness that any remaining people in their lives are afraid to spend time with them and they believe their cats can speak to them.
Of course there is a surprising correlation between people testing positive for schizophrenia and having more than four cats.
It seems that if unable to successfully socialize with our own kinds we form bonds with members outside our species. Pretty open-minded. Which reminds me, Dylan is probably waiting for me to come to bed.
