I am feeling very alienated tonight. From what, I can not tell you. From life, I suppose? I’m not going to get all existential on you and I promise this won’t be a terribly long post, but I just want to think a moment on this feeling.
One would think it would be hard to feel lonely on a planet with 7 billion people on it, but I manage. Today I have felt lonely. I’ve always had something of the loner in me, and that has usually been okay with me because I frequently like books more than people anyway. Though I don’t hate people; I enjoy the living hell out of them, just not at every single moment of the day, you know?
So loneliness is not foreign to me and generally I’m okay with it - you know - because I write, and that’s a solitary activity, and because I’m a surprisingly curmudgeonly little bastard despite the fact I’m not that old or small or curmudgeonly.
Once I was seeing a charming and delightful girl. She had dark hair and big gorgeous eyes and a beautiful tattoo in the skin down her side and I remember that we got to talking one morning, over coffee and smoking, about the readings that I occasionally get to do. She was a writer too and she hated doing them and she knew that I loved doing them (and I don’t suck at them, BTW) and I remember her telling me that there was a strange disconnect between my energetic readings and my frequently sedate state of being otherwise. And I told her that, for me, there is very much a switch that gets flipped between being on and being off. I don’t think of that as a manipulation or as something artificial, but I remember her look and I remember thinking that she thought a little less of me in that moment. As though switch-flipping was somehow disingenuous. That moment sticks to me. Maybe because she was - for better or worse - incapable of being disingenuous. Or maybe because that look she gave me really called out that sad and quiet and lonely germ in me.
That germ has grown all big and choleric today. Shifty, that thing is. Even worse when there’s no one to call it out. But please don’t imagine me sitting around crying into my beer while reading Kafka. There is great joy and beauty and adventure in life and I know that and enjoy enjoying that, but that’s also what makes me sad. These sad little days are made sadder by the fact that they aren’t days filled with adventure and beauty and joy. We can’t kayak the Colorado River every day, though I wouldn’t mind trying.
I guess that I am not “alienated” today. I guess what I am is just a little dark humoured. A little lost. But you can’t ever find anything new without getting a little lost first. I’ve been lost in the wilderness enough times to know that being lost ain’t that big a deal as long as you believe that in pretty short order you won’t be lost anymore.
Once I was up in the Tablelands above the Sequoias with my friend Mike the Director and we were basically lost on that moonscape. I think we had some vague idea which way was maybe north. And bounding over the ridgeline came a couple of inexplicably buoyantly happy Germans who were clearly headed in the wrong direction. They were more lost than us and didn’t even know it. We managed to set them straight and put them back on the right path because we were a tiny bit less lost than they were. I guess that’s how I feel today; lost but maybe not quite as lost as I could be. There’s potential in that, I suppose. And so maybe I shouldn’t glower so much on these sad and insignificant days because these are the days that make the good ones so good.
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