Living Alone.

Heading into this summer I was lucky enough to pick up a full-time job as a staff member at the college library where I had been working as an assistant. In about two weeks I’ll transition back from grown-up-town to student-assistant-ville again because I’m not allowed to be a student teacher and a state of California CSU staff member at the same time. Lame.

That’s fine, whatever. I entered freely into a system that is designed for 22-year-olds who still live at home.

The summer has been pleasant so far. It is probably the easiest job I have ever had. It is big on monotony and I have a superhuman capacity to tolerate such things at work. You - for instance - would have self-immolated a month ago just so that you could feel alive again, but I don’t freak out that way. It is boring work, but I work to find the interesting in it.

The larger point though is that it is the kind of work that I can do while listening to stuff and one of my projects this summer (in addition to writing a collection of poetry, doing Project 333, and generally being awesome) has been to listen to This American Life. All of it. 

I have been working my way backward from 2015 and right now I am knee deep in 2009. Ira and his team have been on the air since 1995 so obviously I am not going to get through it all. That is just math and would have been obvious if I had thought to do the math when the summer started. But this is one of those things that makes me better for having attempted it.

Today though I felt a little bit assailed. Not intentionally, but assailed nonetheless. If you were interested in thematically titling the This American Life Episodes 391 through 402, you might want to call them, “Even this guy has a girlfriend!”

This blog post is going to be all sour grapes from here on.

That’s not really true though.

I’ve been living - for some time now - a quite contented bachelor life. I really do like my life. I like my mattress on the floor, I like my futon/couch, I like my cat, and my ability to do whatever I want at any given moment. Occasionally I go get the mail without bothering to put pants on and no one yells at me about it. It's kinda great.

Also, I’m not someone who tends to get terribly lonely. I find my own company rather entertaining and I have a lot of easy friends (by which I mean: people I like who I can go get a drink with but whose lives I don’t have to be involved in). There are moments though when I do miss having that someone in my life. I’ve come to discover that “significant other” is one of those politically correct terms which has proved to have some useful existential value.  Just say it a couple of times: significant other, significant other.

It is that other person in your life who is significant. I’m willing to admit that I miss that. I miss being someone’s person. Their go-to. And I miss having a go-to.

That being said, I’m just whining. It’s not like I’m on match.com or speed-dating or anything, so how much do I really miss it? I mean really?

There is a fantastic song by the otherwise forgettable Mr. T Experience called “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend” and that is how This American Life made me feel today because one of the dudes in one of the stories was a landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? He had a girlfriend.

One guy went to Baja California for no good goddamn reason to hunt down the landlord-murdering meth addict and you know what? That guy had a wife.

One guy hated everyone and was bemoaning how long his social circle had to mourn the death of a friend with cancer and that guy was married.

One guy moved home to sate his childhood daddy issues by rebuilding his father’s rundown house over the course of A YEAR and THAT GUY had a wife.

One guy was on death row for having MURDERED a dude, and THAT GUY had a girlfriend.

One guy experienced amnesia while in India, flew back to the United States, and had a girlfriend when he landed who still loved him and whom he did not remember AT ALL.

AND there was a whole story (from The Moth) about one woman in an abusive relationship who met another woman in an abusive relationship and how they bonded over how fucked up their abusive relationships were and then they both WENT BACK TO THOSE GUYS.

Just kick me in the teeth why don’t you Ira Glass?

Anyway, like I said, this is not a bitchfest, rather it is just a nominal and pragmatic WHAT THE FUCK?! to the universe. An open letter, if you will.

There are things about my life that I treasure, but - at the same time -  I am bothered by the fact that other people seem to be making connections better than I am or more frequently that I do. And to dispel your questions: I’m not bad looking or smelly or naive or particular demanding. But then I guess, neither is that dude on death row who’s just waiting to get executed, while holding hands with his girlfriend.

Oh! And just because it seems thematically contiguous, below is a brilliant song by The Helio Sequence called “Lately”, which I always think is sung by Ryan Adams but which actually is not:

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