TUESDAY, 29 JULY 2003
You don’t want to unnecessarily keep hammering on the same note, but I think one of these days I’m going to be in deep shit. My suspicion is strong that I have estranged all four of my friends at different times, and for different reasons. (Is this better than to alienate them for the same reason?) More than that, the suspicion is developing that they’re even going so far as to avoid me. Can you believe it? Innocent old me who always carries on in discussions about “struggle and creation” and who delivers such well-meaning lectures to anyone within earshot about how their lives are worth bugger-all if they can’t stand away from their own creations and like the God of Genesis say, “It’s good!” (And to think I’m just trying to help them lead more fulfilling lives.)
In all honesty, I don’t think my theories and sermons are the only blunt swords that scare off friends and potential acquaintances. I am, except for my highly original theories and associated monologues, a highly boring individual. To be sure, I can join in the conversation around the barbecue fire if the conversation is about history or religion, but I might be tempted to be too clever, and maybe to know too much for the other people to also feel good about their general knowledge. So, unless the conversation is about sin, the Iraq war, Hitler, Stalin, or the Middle Ages, I am in trouble. I don’t have a motorcycle (can’t even ride one), and I don’t go along to beach resorts on weekends. I never tell dirty jokes beside said barbecue fires (can never remember the damn things), and I never do anything on my own that will cause people to tell others about it so I can build up a healthy social reputation.
But let’s stop staggering around the nettle tree. The primary reason I’m persona non grata is because I always arrive at events alone, and I never leave with anyone (mainly of the opposite sex). I am, therefore, by definition, a loner. And as people have known since before the time of John the Baptist, everyone shits in their pants when it looks like a loner is heading in their direction.
The Loner babbles on about things that only he understands and finds interesting. The Loner is a leper. The Loner is a hunchback. The Loner has a skin disease that causes his scent to be picked up from a distance. The Loner has tuberculosis, or AIDS … that drips blood from open sores on his hands that threatens to infect all those standing around barbecue fires telling dirty jokes.
The Loner is a fucking genius. It can’t be any other way. I mean, even if he didn’t hold a degree in history and religious studies, even if he hasn’t written a book of several hundred pages about his own life, even if he wasn’t already working on his second volume of poetry (which, like the first, would be an unpublished masterpiece), even if he hasn’t formulated his own principles of a Meaningful Life, he must necessarily be exceptional: An unknown prophet who are not even recognised in a foreign country, let alone in his own backyard (if he could ever afford such a thing in the country of his birth).
He must be something special, someone who is just not understood and appreciated by the plebs that he would have liked to call his friends. Why? Because god only knows, if he isn’t, he’s nothing. Then he’s a rotting carcass avoided even by other intelligent, sophisticated, enlightened people he had once called “friends”. For instinct forces even the most enlightened among us to turn away from what is dead. To flee away from that which once lived, but that has since first taken a turn for the worst, and then went to die a slow death in the half-lit solitude of his private quarters, somewhere in a neighbourhood where no one who speaks his language ever shows their face.
Oh well. Fuck everyone, then.
THURSDAY, 31 JULY 2003
Who read my piece on hammering on the same note?
Since Tuesday, 29 July 2003 at 1:32 in the morning my one friend phoned to ask if I had time – he wanted to show me a new bicycle shop in town. Later I called one of my other friends. We talked for over an hour about work, and about the uncertainties she struggles with every day. And so on. She’s apparently really busy. She apparently really has more friends than yours truly, and some of her friends keep her busy with up to twenty mobile text messages per day. This morning just after breakfast, my other friend called. She was sorry she’s been so quiet recently, but until the end of this week she’s busy from Chinese class in the morning until half past nine in the evening with work. So, she asked, how about coffee tonight at her place.
Oh well.
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