Now Let’s Hold Hands And Sing “We Are The World”

I was sprawled out on the mat at the Y, stretching my aged muscles in preparation for my morning run, when she walked in and greeted me by name. My autopilot was already engaged, so I offered the standard-issue "How ya doin’?"

"I’m tired."

Not "tired" as in having just completed a strenuous physical workout. She had just walked in the door and checked the kids into the daycare center. This was "tired" as in contemplation of trying to pack another ditty bag of a day with a week’s worth of chores and responsibilities. The Y time is something she does for herself, and she feels guilty for it. She’s cute-as-a-bug, a wife and a mother of three beautiful little kids. She was probably born about the time that I was failing my first college-level course. That makes her young enough, but far too attractive, to be a child of my own.

I could have dismissed her response as an autoreply to my own spam greeting, but I disengaged my autopilot and seized the opportunity to do what I do best: hand-fly a little doom and gloom over the target area and open the bomb bay doors.

"It only gets worse."

Perhaps it’s my own track record of immeasurable failures and bitter disappointments that compels me to counsel others on their own impending failures and disappointments. They can’t see the train coming, so I feel obligated to point it out to them. And then tell them there’s nothing they can do to get out of the way.

Had I been a parent, my pessimism-based system may have actually been the preferable methodology. Consider the parent who refuses to purchase a lottery ticket because of the insurmountable odds against winning. This is the same parent who will unabashedly tell his kid that he can grow up to be president. No he can’t. He can’t, because there is already a kid out there who can’t avoid becoming president. Achieving the presidency requires a pedigree established in the womb, as well as considerable funding. The kid with that pedigree and funding is out there right now, filling his Pampers with gold doubloons, and he is going to become president no matter how hard he tries not to. He can join the Texas Air National Guard and flee to Alabama, spend 20 years in a drug and alcohol induced haze, pass out in Hunter Thompson’s bathtub, and even refuse to learn his native tongue. But he will be apprehended and forced to become president. Twice. It’s his destiny.

I would have been a more honest and less misleading parent. Refusing to adopt the "grow up to be president" motivational crap, I would have opted for buying my kid a weekly lottery ticket. If you’re going to gamble, play the odds that are calculable. After all, look at this mythical kid of mine. If he gets through a day without swallowing his tongue, my mythical wife bakes a cake.

So I proceeded to offer this tired young woman my own version of "This Is Your Life."

"In your twenties, you are filled with hopes and aspirations. You are embarking on a great adventure, and you imagine the tremendous sense of accomplishment you will feel as you achieve each milestone in your grand plan."

This poor little gal had set sail this morning with no spinnaker, a torn mainsail, and a jib that was merely luffing in the light breeze. I reached for my jib cutters.

"In your thirties, you yank on the cord as each milestone passes, but the bus doesn’t stop and your transfer doesn’t get punched. You just settle back and try to protect your window seat. You keep looking outward because it’s unnerving to view the myriad of other passengers rocking in their seats and muttering to themselves."

"But you seem to be doing okay." Her offering sounded more like an inquiry than an observation.

"I laugh a lot, but that’s just a release of delirium. You see, in your forties you reach the age of reconciliation. That reconciliation can fall on either side of a very fine line that separates acceptance from simply giving the fuck up. Either way, it’s a resignation to the fact that you are driving down one road and, off in the distance, you can see the one you should have been traveling. You can’t get there from here, and you can’t go back. Your road leads to an inglorious destination, and all of the remaining rest areas have clogged toilets. Unless you’re Colonel Sanders. You’re not."

As she wandered off to her class, I noticed that she had left her cloud’s silver lining behind. I would have returned it to her, but upon closer inspection it was just tinfoil anyway.

See why I live alone? Have a nice day.

At Least You Could Pretend To Ignore Me

"That was funny what you said, about David being a hypnotist."

The words rocked me like a clap of thunder. My jolt of adrenaline had nothing to do with the subject matter of my comment about David. David was her father-in-law and, after having met him weeks earlier, I cracked to her that he missed his calling because, after listening to him drone on and on, I quit smoking even though I hadn’t wanted to. Funny. I said it because it amused me. But I didn’t think she was listening.

For months now, as long as I had known her, I was certain that she never heard anything I said. She was immersed in a world bounded by her own skull, and when she wasn’t talking she was thinking of the next thing she would say. Sometimes she would interrupt herself and change the subject, with no segue to address the transition in topics:

"My daughter drew a picture of a flower at school today and gave it to me as a gift. I don’t think those mums looked healthy."

Earlier in our friendship, I would have thought that she had just confused her singulars and plurals. Having been around long enough to understand her dialect, however, I knew that the flower picture incident occurred today and the mum image arose from our trip to the farmer’s market last week. The common theme of flowers was purely coincidental. Cause and effect had no bearing on the rapid misfires of electrical energy in her brain.

But she remembered the hypnotist joke from six weeks ago! It didn’t matter that she remembered it within the context-barren splattering of otherwise unrelated yammering. The fact that it registered in her memory at all, and that it spilled out of nowhere, sent me reeling.

Until this moment, I had found comfort in knowing that I could be with her and be alone at the same time. She was a convenient prop when I wanted to attend an event, but going alone would draw too much attention. A solitary, middle-aged, long-haired, unshaven man sets the general citizenry on edge. They sneak nervous glances at me, then try to match my face to the FBI flyers at the post office, or to the mug shots on the state’s sex offender website. Showing up with a companion of the opposite sex allows me to blend in with the background. Just another couple. Yet, with her by my side, I could operate as though alone, and have my own delightful conversations with myself, because I was certain she was in another zip code, time zone, and planetary cycle. The seat next to me was occupied, yet vacant.

She was an attractive, well-dressed younger woman, and I was aware that the visual image we presented was not unlike that of an abduction-in-process. I had to lend the appearance to onlookers that we were conversing amicably, but it was convenient not to have to make any sense. I didn’t have to disrupt my own train of thought to carry out the mission.

"Sometimes I fill my hat with popcorn and pretend I’m a colonel."

"Two plus two equals blue, but that still doesn’t explain where polyesters come from."

"I have a turtle."

I could throw these little tidbits out there and she wouldn’t bat an eye. She’d continue describing the spider web she’d found in the kitchen window last Tuesday while she was eating soup from the bowl she got in New Mexico, where her mother bowls in a league with a woman with dentures and a cat named Taffy who uses the toilet like a person, but the soup needed salt and the dentures slipped once when she was startled by a spider.

And I could go back to being alone, comfortable in the duck blind that was provided by virtue of her presence. She was the camouflage that allowed me to be antisocial and alone in crowded public venues. To casual observers, we appeared to be having an animated conversation. They had no idea that she was describing her dog’s thumbs while I was planning my next bike trip.

Had my scheme backfired? Was she listening to and retaining this stuff? For all of this time I thought my voice was broadcast in a frequency that her species could not hear. But now I was left to scan my memory for all of the nonsensical remarks I had made, and that she may actually remember.

I mistakenly thought I could be alone in a crowd, while on a date with a woman who was already married to a rich guy, so I didn’t have to marry her or pay for anything, and I could meditate or talk to myself out loud without being noticed or heard. But now my perfect world had been torn asunder. Ruined. All because her disk skipped and she remembered something I said. It was worse than being asked what I was thinking. I was tricked into revealing my thoughts.

Now I am relegated, once again, to traveling alone and dealing with the wary glances of strangers. I have learned my lesson, and I won’t fall for this again. The operatives are out there among us, and the surveillance is pervasive.

How dare her listen to me and destroy a beautiful relationship.