The Shut-In Laughs Last

It struck me this evening, how much time I spend avoiding other people.

I'm generally not a buddy-buddy kind of guy, rarely have an interest in other men. Which is funny, because I grew up idolizing men. My car mechanic grandfather raised me, and I was referred to as his "shadow." Everywhere he went, I went. We ate together, slept together, even urinated at the same time together. After Rufus Lee Carter died, I really sought a father figure, needed one, but there wasn't a man half as good or decent or respected as my grandfather. So that search came up snake eyes. I idolized heroes, Indiana Jones and R.J. MacReady and the Incredible Hulk, who reeked of fierce individual manliness. But fictional heroes couldn't give me advice on how to deal with bullies and talk to girls. So eventually even they turned away from a needful teenager.

Every kid needs a dad and a hero. If they get both in the same dude, they should forever be grateful.

At some point, post high school, I realized the extreme and crippling shyness I had suffered most of my life was becoming full-blown pathology. I had shut down the kind of receptors to social behavior I'd once been taught, while yearning painfully not to be alone any longer. Obviously girls were out of the question.

In later life, I overcame a lot of the severity of the social phobia, finally becoming a man who could display intellect and sexuality and physicality even. This effort was mostly due to the administrations of close, singular friends, and the love of beautiful women who, like casting agents, recognized my potential. And also I needed a little blue pill to calm whatever evil lurked in the treetops of my brain. But I like to believe it was at least somewhat force of will, to rid myself of childhood devils.

Today, I spend prodigious amounts of time alone, in a room, trying to be a writer. I'm there now. It isn't easy, and no one pats me on the back for making the effort. Unlike pathology, there's no quantifiable means to assess creative endeavor. Cavemen probably had no idea scratching at a wall was meant to do anything but be a warning to others not to get caught in the open with a Sabretooth tiger.

The reason I idolize the Hulk: he's angry a lot, he's lonely a lot, and all he ever wanted was to be left alone. Particularly by stupid puny humans. 

But what I know for sure is how repelled I am by most people. Not those familar and adored few, so important to me, but the mass of human beings. Their insidious presences are not welcome. The bar trolls in their heels and the street people with their plastic bags, the college students in their fluffy boots and the lawyers waiting for the jury with vodka tonic in hand, the black teens in ass-bag pants and the Chinese delivery drivers. They are diverse only in that they smell different, one to the other, like spices, and as a whole they are a cloying brimstone of unease. Their subliminal message is an invitation, a dramatic overture of possibility, one could even say "adventure awaits." I've lived long enough to know how arresting other people are, how destructive, how submissive and mesmerizing. But only for very short periods of time, and only in the awkward moments before tedium sets in.

I fear people, generally, not for what they might do to me, but for what they expect me to do. You, me, all of us. To perform, to amuse, to satiate, to hurt. We all consist of magnetic fields and electric charges, and universes die when we make contact. I do not wish to be a "shut-in" as it's now called, but nothing in the vapid whirlpool of drama people represent calls to me. They are, in short, strangers. Not because I do not know them, but because I am stranger than they will ever be. And I enjoy it.