#44

Today as I was walking home, I looked to my right into a dense leafy brush, and saw the tip of a squirrel's tail flash tawny in the goldshot murk. 

*

Being alone is a fine thing, a needful thing. I like being alone. I like that a great deal. I like it nice and lonesome, and I like lonely places not often trod. I don't like being lonely; no one likes that. I read that being lonely is a problem in the modern world, perhaps a health epidemic. I wondered if perhaps the next article might solemnly inform me that fire burns.

Sticking out like a sore thumb is a more violent form of loneliness. I was never like anyone in my peer group. No one is, not wholly. But there are of course levels to this shit. People have no love for weirdness or outsideness, but they actively dislike intelligent people (exceptions made for people who make them feel as intelligent as they are [usually charlatans on the news]), and they cannot bear imaginative people. I'm not trying to stroke my own dick and I'm not saying this makes people bad; this is just something I have had ample cause to note, since an admixture of these traits is a large part of my experience of selfhood and I have been educated alongside and worked with other people for a lifetime. If you think I'm a normal moron without an imagination, I recommend you read something else, and have no idea why you waited this long to stop.

I was an exceptionally strange kid, a very strange teenager, and have grown into a strange but finally wary man, and people have never been ashamed to let me know all about it. I'm strange enough that people do not mind if they offend me by pointing out how strange I am. That sort of thing is fine with me, though. There are much subtler, much colder and more poisonous ways the loneliness makes itself felt. The apartness.

People's chatter hardly factors. It is the cold membrane between you and the flow of the quotidian and secure that takes its toll. You imagine all sorts of weird shit about yourself, and start to believe it. You start wondering what curse marks your brow.

Puzzling, that people find me strange. I find it a marvel, the stuff about me that they find remarkable and risible. I make utter and absolute sense to myself. If it weren't for public and lifelong assurances to the contrary, I would say that I was the boring one, surrounded by obscurely-motivated, rude, usually angry lunatics.

* 

Read my books? You should do it. They might be kind of weird, though.


--JL