TALKING WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS

*CLICKY CLICKY*

click above on the Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" for 2 of 4. hmmm, this all seems strangely familiar...




                     the roads were all clear, hardly a car on them, i thought to myself as i was confronted by the four of them. i just kept thinking how this entire December people weren't around, they were just...not here, somewhere else, shopping, doing things, not online, the blogs were as abandoned as the highway. it's a December thing i suppose, an end-of-the-year thing, people stop their daily routine to hide in their caves and reflect. just wish they would invite me into their caves, i'm lonely...save for the few folks here trying to save me.

                        as they began the intervention, i didn't listen to a word each of them had to say, not out of disrespect, for i'm sure their speeches were imbued with honor and dignity and with the urgency that this matter called for, we were talking about the rest of my life here. no, instead i looked into each speaker's eyes and delved into a haze, a trance not noticeable to them for i didn't want to be found out, but this was my little cave of thought, i silently gazed at their faces and reminisced how each one was special to me. i wasn't always a loner, no, no, i've had a great life, i had people in my corner, i had a magical childhood, but still, things turned out like this. it wasn't any of their faults, though a teenage me thought otherwise. the adult thing to do is simply to know it was my fault all along, accept who i am, and realize that my life has turned out thusly and i am making a final decision accordingly. is it even my fault though? these philosophical quandries are fun to dissect because there will never be a satisfactory answer. no, better just to remain poetic, say it is "of the stars" and move on. it's nobody's fault, it's just life. besides, thinking, ponderously analyzing, never got me anywhere. thought trembles. action moves.

                       by the time we got to my mother, i couldn't look, because it was my mother, the concept of her was so loaded for me that it was better just to give her a blind hug and talk about the bitterly-cold weather than to venture much further into what she meant to me and what i meant to her. it was better unspoken, for the minute the words required for such a statement are spoken, they suicide themselves from too much meaning inside them, they explode on the spot. i loved her, she loved me, i live because of her, i give my life to her, i live in her eternal memory, her heart forever, i GIVE IT ALL BACK TO HER, CLICK HERE, RIGHT HERE AT THIS LINK when we all start again.

                       i thanked them all, hid a tear from them, then decided, wait, what the fuck am i doing? this isn't the usual racecourse of things, why not show them me crying for the last time, why not make this my last act in front of them, this will express how i feel about them more effectively than any rushed email or awkward phone call could. so, i stood there, spilled some standard patter about how much i appreciated everything they had done for me, and that i really truly truly took their hard advice to heart. my crying was necessary two-fold: first, to show rather than to say with words as empty as air, but also as a tacit response to their intervention which was molded long before they had time to come up with their speeches: no matter what they said, this was still happening. i think they knew this, this procedure was just that, a process, an act, a play put on just 'cause that's what families do, you could see it in their faces as they looked at my face softened into a mini smile of acceptance: i love you all, but i have to say goodbye now.

                   i lugged the silver canister with a sturdy rope onto the back basket of my bike and scrambled into the night like a scared fox. it was just me they saw on the road, a dot getting smaller and smaller, turning into a speck, a dot with a white headlight and red backlight, it was pretty funny seeing the white/red light only speeding along the curvy road by the sea like a firefly...well, more like a lit-up ant awaiting its fate from a boot in the distance.

                   driving along the ocean, i took this as the perfect opportunity to do something i had always wanted to do but never had the guts...though it would have been stupid before since i had business and pleasure to tend to. i took out my black ipad mini from my satchel. this thing which held so much promise for years before, this device which was going to be my sex and love replacement...let me down and reaffirmed what i knew all along: it's hard, life is hard, love is hard, there is no quick fix to love, no shortcut to sex, no easy solutions through mental illness, you pay for all the sex you ever have, pleasure comes at a price, flesh friends are what's needed, online lovers are but wisps of air that don't really exist, if you want to lose all the weight, only traditional diet and exercise will work, not the latest fad diet pill You're Whole system. my experience with computer living started innocently enough: you're just another person, another cog amongst the millions online who have their own youtube channel and blog page, so how are little ol' you gonna stand out? by becoming a troll, not a mean troll, but a troll who comments on your stuff when you don't necessarily want him to comment, at least not in that way, the one whose comments feel aggressive and like you want to sweep this monster out of your computer house becuse he challenges you in some way, makes you think things you don't want to think about before you've even had breakfast. hopefully, for the both of you, you get past your foibles and personality defects and become talking "friends". but, inevitably, life gets in the way, and the person doesn't post anything for five months. lots can happen in five months: weddings, funerals. by the time she comes back, something has changed in the relationship, all the momentum has been let out of the balloon, it's still her, but you wonder if you should pursue things anymore. it feels to you that commenting again, responding to one of her scintillating blogspot posts or revolutionary youtube vids is too much work. if you did it, it would be as a troll again, interfering, sticking your nose into other people's business at the exact wrong time with an insensitive attempt at a joke. it's not friends bantering anymore, it's a job between coworkers, and you wonder if you were ever "friends" at all. what was the point of this five-year-long comment exchange? just to kill time? to keep your mind distracted from darker revelations about yourself bubbling to the surface trying to get out?


                  wisps, my darling, let the wisps guide you when you're alone at night sleeping, dreaming...



                   technology let me down. technology failed me.



                   i threw my ipad into the ocean.





TO BE CONTINUED...



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