ALONE or LONESOME?

There is nothing like enforced solitude to focus your attention on yourself, whether or not it is something you want to do or enjoy doing. And certainly my desire to reach out beyond the walls of my broken-down bicameral mind has gotten me into nothing but trouble, though the results have given me lots to think over. Here are some things that swim to the surface:

Yours truly is not very bright, on some level. I seem to have acquired some glasses with very peculiar lenses, which allow me to see what is going on only in retrospect. Some people have such powerful antennae that they can read things off a person that make the subject's blood run cold -- I have been the recipient of such attention, and I tell you it can be extremely creepy. But I was apparently born on the opposite end of the spectrum. Maybe that is why my refrain is "No, go ahead, hit me with the brick. I may get it then." I seem completely unable to pick up on hints.

The corrolary of that is that because I can't pick up on the clues that are there, I am always in a panic about clues that might have been there that I missed. If someone doesn't return an e-mail or a call, I start obsessing about how I could have offended them. Now, don't think this is entirely paranoia; I have spent my life apologizing for unintended slights, and the present is no exception. I am beginning to think that I have unwittingly pissed off most of the people "in power" in the gay society of our little urb/suburb, and I have only been here a month and a half. A true friend of mine listened to one of my latest gaffes, and said with a smile audible over the phone: "That's why we love you, Troll." So stupid he's lovable. Great.

I am looking at the world's incomprehension of my taking [planning to take] a year to sort out my head and heart after leaving my marriage, and I see a fun-house mirror of my own experience reflected in it. From the comments and perhaps even more from what is not said, I can get some idea of what I look like to others, which collides mightily with the way I look to me, and calls my own self-understanding into question. Suddenly, things lock into place that put many things in my life in a new light, not necessarily correctly, but startlingly. And then I have to grapple with the possibility that what motivated me at times where I thought I was in charge and knew what was going on was just as confused as what's going on now.

Then there are the obvious questions: if you have made a decision [again] for religious reasons, and the great decision of your life for religious reasons turns out to have been insupportable, you start wondering where religion -- or any kind of conscious thought -- has gotten you in life. Or whether you weren't just cloaking your confused impulses [fear? inability to commit? confusion?] under a garment that the outside world could accept without comment. Oh, to be accepted without comment, even once! Consummation devoutly to be wished, as the Great Dane said...

Well, I have finally realized that a job where I essentially sit alone all day is not too great a break from the rest of my life, in which I sit around on my own and think about how much I can get away with drinking without it becoming an "issue". [Not that my time at the office involves much of that thought; one thing about repetitive tasks like data entry is that it tends to obliterate rather than liberate thought.] So I am going to try to land a couple of volunteer gigs that will keep me off the street to a greater extent, and bring me into a slightly wider circle. There is nothing like leaving a place you have lived for twenty years to make you realize that the idea that you had no friends was idiocy; it is once you land a hundred miles away and spend all your time on your own that you realize what having no friends really looks like...

I will say this, though: I have met with some incomprehension, some stupidity, and even some malicious stupidity, over the last few months. But what really strikes me, what blows me away, is the constantly renewed sense that people are really trying to help, want to help, would help if I would only let them near enough. We may be closer to the mud than to the stars, but when we rise above our baser natures, we are an amazing race.

Let's hear it for humans: Even the people we tend to hold at arm's length, as though any category that were important to us mattered to a Higher Intelligence.


It never ceases to amaze me how politics gets used to divide people; Swift had it right with the doctrinal battles over whether the egg should go into the egg-cup big-end or little-end up... I say we are all here in the muck together, and the sooner we can admit that, the sooner we can all climb up out of it.

This just in: Mr. X in Bothell, WA has been here twice a day since the beginning of the month; he must be my greatest fan. The mad people [it has to be more than one person!] in Burlington, VT have been here six times a day, and the crew in Beacon Falls, CT [dear God, let it not be one person!] have been to this site twelve times a day... that's every two hours, on average. Good grief.

May the Lord have mercy on us all.
Hang in there.
I do my best.