The Million Word Year

One man. One blog. One year. One million words.

Thoughts : Consumerism and life above the line

Sep 3

Posted by MegaWordMan in Articles | No Comments

Almost everyone has been poor at some point.

I don’t mean in terms of whether you grew up in a middle class or working class (or no class) household, or whether you ate steak or hamburger for dinner.

As kids, at the very least, we all know the experience of wanting more than we can afford, and dreaming of what we will do when we have more money.

Those of us who go to college end up with our first taste of real poverty there. Living in a budget, worrying about life expenses, keeping a household if we go the apartment route.

College or not, nobody start off their career in the corner office. We all know what it is like to be starting out and barely making enough to make ends meet, and how good it was to get that raise and be able to afford nicer things, and how that made you felt.

So nearly everyone in society knows that more money equals more happy. It is a simple equation, and all our lives and all the messages we get from out society leads us to think that this goes on forever. No matter how much you have, more will always be better.

But the thing is, past a certain point, that formula just plain stops working.

I call this point the “comfort line”, and it is a line just like the poverty line, but instead of dividing the rich from the poor and the haves from the have nots, it decides the “have somes” from the “have enoughs”.

I wouldn’t dare to try to put a dollar value on this line, but I can broadly define it as the point past which all your basic needs are well met. Food, shelter, water, security, comfort, these are all things you can pay for without strain. Life’s little pleasures are also something you do not worry about affording. Nice furniture, a roomy house, a good TV, and other things are not a big problem.

And here is the kicker : there’s money left over after all that stuff.

Now when you life has been lived, up until this point, with the very real and firm pattern of more money meaning better things and a better life, it would take a fairly amazing act of perspective for you to see that this might stop at any point. So you begin to look around at your possessions and wonder if you could get a better one of these, or a nicer one of those. You had no problem with these things when you bought them, but now, the need to continue to feel the sense of purpose and accomplishment and direction that the consumer acquisition ladder had give your life up until this point, your mind must manufacture some discontent with the very things you were so happy to be able to afford before.

And that, in a nutshell, is why people spend so much money on crap.

Because if you are content with what you have, but there is still money left over, well, what are you going to do with it? Your whole life has said that material acquisition is the route to happiness. If there was not always a better, or at least a different, thing to buy, we would be stuck without a purpose or a focus. The money would accumulate and have noplace to go. We could save it, but a voice in our head would be asking “Saving it for what? what are we saving up to get?”, and without an answer, would cause us to become frustrated and out of sorts.

This is where a lot of people find themselves when they reach middle class middle age. They have, by all reasonable measures, “made it”. The stimulus to ambition and acquisition provided by having a family has faded. You have the house, the spouse, the kids, the vehicles, the lifestyle, the career.

And suddenly it all seems so hollow, so pointless, so futile, because it is not making you happy any more. With all your material and social needs met, the spotlight is firmly on higher needs, spiritual needs. You ponder your mortality, you wonder about your lost youth, you start seeing the end of the tunnel of life. Because you have met your other needs so well, there is no longer anything distracting you from your remaining unanswered needs : for meaning, for purpose, for connection to something greater than yourself, for community, for humanity, for things your money simply cannot buy.

For some people, this leads to an increasing desperation to their consumerism. They buy more and more expensive items, often going well beyond their perfectly good incomes and living far outside their means because they are trying to get that feeling of material success back again, trying to do, basically, what they have done up to that point, only to find it has stopped working, or at the very least, that the high is shorter and the crash is worse and longer each time.

Others make a break. Marriages break up, families torn apart, because, basically, one or both parent had reached this point in their life and suddenly, they feel trapped and smothered by jobs, spouses, children, and obligations that no longer mean anything to them.

And all because nobody tells us a simple fact when we are children : some day, you may have enough. You may reach the point where more money would not make you happier, where your life is more or less exactly how you want it, and you will run out of things to buy, things to get, that will make your life better.

And that is fine. That is normal. There is nothing wrong with you. In a consumerist society, a lack of desire for better things can seem like a profound mental illness, but it is not. You have reached the comfort line, and there is not, suddenly, something horribly horribly wrong with your life, or your spouse, or your job, or your family, or you.

There is nothing wrong with decided you have enough and don’t really want any more. You do not have to keep eating at the material goods buffet until you are sick. You can stop when you feel nicely full, and that does not mean the buffet will close and you will never be let back in.

You are just done. There’s no shame in that.

And I think a lot of harm could be avoided if people simply knew that.

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Cute : Cat invents novel stair descending method

Sep 3

Posted by MegaWordMan in Journal, Links, Memoir, Video | No Comments

Thanks to my dear friend Felicity for this link.

This cat is apparently clever enough to take advantage of the fact that cats are actually a liquid to sort of flow down the stairs in an effective but extremely goofy looking method.

I wonder how he got up those stairs in the first place?

I have clear memories of, as a wee one, descending the stairs in my family home by the extraordinary “bouncing down on your bottom” method. Ka thump thump thump, on my precious tiny posterior, and I thought nothing of it. And according to my mother, my three siblings all did it when they were that age as well, so I was not alone in this bizarre behaviour.

As an adult, I can’t even imagine that. I have no idea how I could do that without ending up in the hospital. Toddlers must be made of rubber.

Much later in life, when I was a teenager and really growing like crazy, the stairs provided another fun challenge : not clipping my head on the previously completely harmless overhang. Our house was quite old and built when people were a little shorter, so I got to find out the hard way that there was one spot on the stairs which I would not hit if I went down the stairs in a normal, slow, safe fashion, but I was a teenager and I tended to go down the stairs in a manner I called “efficient” and my mother called “a barely controlled fall”. Admittedly, I did tend to hit the bottom of the stairs with more remaining momentum than by the usual method, but my brakes were good and I hardly ever slammed into any walls very hard.

After clipping my temple on the overhang, however, I realize I would need to seriously reconsider this method. Holy crabcakes that hurt. But being a teenager, I just laughed it off while I bled from the head and said “Whoops, I guess I better be more careful, huh?”

To my mother’s chagrin, though, I just learned to duck my head a little and did not, in fact, stop using the “cannonball” method of stair descending.

My brother had similar problems adjusting to his growth spurt, and a similar manner of going down stairs, but his nemesis was in our basement.

See, the basement was where we had our washing machine, and it was bisected by an enormous thick PVC pipe which was the main “out” pipe for the whole house. It hung from the ceiling, but was so big that this reduced clearance by a good six inches at least.

So after a certain point in his own teen growth spurt, my brother would find, a surprisingly large number of times given that he is an intelligent person, that coming down the basement steps with a lot of momentum left would result in him slamming his head against said PVC pipe before he could come to a full and complete stop to avoid it.

So a number of times in my life (I would have been between ten and twelve at this point), I heard the exact same series of sounds : basement door opening, thundering footsteps down the basement steps, a alight pause, then SLAM as my poor brother’s skull rebounded off the PVC pipe and made all the plumbing in the house shake, then another slight pause, then my brother’s emphatic declaration : “FUCK. ”

Meanwhile, I am in the living room, laughing like a loon, but doing my best to laugh very very quietly, because I do not want to die.

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Cute : Chinchilla likes rubs

Sep 3

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

We have not had anything really, really cute on here lately.

Well, consider that problem solved!

Awww! What an amazingly fluffy critter. He looks so soft and pettable, and he obviously loves getting a good rub from his owner, so as far as I am concerned, that is heavily win-win. He likes being rubbed, we critter loving humans love rubbing his fluffy soft fur…. life is good.

According to the Wiki entry for them, chinchillas are crepuscular, which is a completely horrible sounding word that just means they tend to be most active at dawn and dusk. This is thought to be a great way to avoid predators, as most of them are either active at night or during the day, and their vision is optimized for either low light or full light, and therefore they are at their weakest during half-light, like twilight.

Both cute and poignant : chinchillas can’t sweat, and so are not built for temperatures over 25 degrees Celsius. They respond to being too hot by routing blood to their big ears in order to radiate more heat, so if your chinchilla’s ears are red, it’s too hot and you need to cool things down for it.

Also, they like to take dust baths, and like most rodents, keep themselves quite clean when they can, so you have to supply them with special chinchilla dust for bathing, which is very fine pumice.

You know, I bet watching a chinchilla take a dust bath is pretty cute.

Yup. I was right.

Oh, and just because I love you people so much, here is some Bonus Cute :

Either that's a tiny sofa, or a huuuge puppy

Awww. Someone is going to get their puppy tummy rubbed!

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Ad : Double Rainbow Guy “sells out”

Sep 3

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Well, this was inevitable.

I am just glad he managed to land a job in a Microsoft ad. That has got to pay mad, mad cash. His window of fame is going to be very brief, as he is just an Internet meme and those live and die like mayflies in a hurry. Hopefully, he will be a smart fellow and bank all the money he makes from this little brush with fame and not get foolish ideas that he is going to parlay this into some huge, long-lasting career. That is just plain not going to happen. Through the mystical and functionally random workings of the Internet, he managed to grab the public’s attention for just a little while. Right now, he is famous for being famous. But if he wants to make that a career, he would have to do more than just show up and be famous.

He would have to give people something more. And I suspect he does not have a lot more. After all, he is not a professional entertainer or broadcaster. He is just a highly likable hippie-ish kind of guy who happened to catch the public’s attention by video taping himself in a period of extreme sincerity.

Such naked sincerity and enthusiasm is a strange and wondrous thing in the snarky, hip, unforgiving world of the Internet, and so such a video had to be passed among us like a strange and fascinating artifact from some distant and exotic land.

Sure, lots of people mocked it. That is part of our reflexive response to sincerity. But I honestly think most people were kind of in awe of it as well. You just do not encounter that kind of unfiltered, unguarded awe and enthusiasm very often in this jaded and defensive world.

For those of you who never saw his claim to fame, or have forgotten it already, here it is :

As to the whole idea that he is “selling out”, man, there is nothing to sell out. He is not a proponent of a particular philosophy or claiming to represent a particular group, idea, philosophy, or interest. He is just a nature loving guy who made a video and got a glimpse of fame. To me, if he found a way to make a bundle off that before he disappears from the radar, more power to him. I don’t feel like he is betraying anything.

He’s just cashing in his ticket while it is worth something, you know what I mean?

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Thoughts : Democracy, collective effort, and hero syndrome

Sep 3

Posted by MegaWordMan in Articles | No Comments

I vote, and I think everyone else should too. I think democracy is exactly as strong as voter turnout, and the more people who vote, the better the resulting government will be on a number of levels, no matter who turns out to win. I sincerely believe in democracy.

So it always bothers me when people tell me that they do not vote. I always try to talk them into it, even though I know from experience how futile that is, and how often I start out trying to convince them to vote but just end up bitterly mocking their decision not to vote and alienating them in the process.

One of the most frequent and infuriating responses when I ask someone why they don’t vote is “Well, what’s the point?”. And for a while, I did not have a good answer to that, it just struck me as such an inane and fruitless reply that I ended up getting mad instead. Not helpful.

Or I would end up going around in futile circles with people, like this :

Nonvoter : So what’s the point?
Me : The point is to vote.
Nonvoter : Yeah, but why?
Me : To exert one vote’s worth of influence on the system.
Nonvoter : Yeah, so what?
Me : You’re right, you shouldn’t vote. Because you’re an idiot.

Again, not helpful.

In order to answer that question, “What is the point of voting?”, I had to really take out my post modern toolkit and desconstruct the response. I had to ask myself “Why is that not good enough for people?”

The answer is simple and very depressing, and it applies to all collective action across the board : people, usually young people, can’t see the point of doing something where they do not get to be the hero.

We are raised on tales of singular heroes who accomplish amazing things all by themselves and get loads of praise and acknowledgment, and so when it comes to something like voting, where no one voter gets any recognition for anything, where, indeed, the vote is secret so you cannot even prove you voted for the winner or anything. It is pure collective action. There is virtually no ego boost possible.

That is what the person is saying when they ask “What’s the point?” They are basically saying “I can’t be bothered to do something unless I get to be a winner. If it isn’t about me, what is the point?”

And you can give them all the spiel about patriotic duty you want, they just don’t care.

And that bothered me a while, but then I started thinking about why I vote, and what it means to me, and I realized that the real reasons are extremely personal, and largely have to do with my own ego as well.

For me, there is great value in simple acts which make you part of the solution and not part of the problem. Coming down on the right side of a question is a matter of pride for me. It would wound my sense of myself as a good person who does what is right to, say, fail to vote, or recycle, or put my candy wrapper in the garbage can instead of tossing it on the street.

It’s that simple. I do not need to be a hero, I just want to be part of the good and not the bad, to do what I think is right. That is all the reward I need, I guess. That is all the point I need.

The way I see it, if you don’t vote, you are basically saying “I will be fine with whatever the rest of you people decide for me. After all, you asked me what I wanted, and I didn’t bother to say anything, so I must not care enough to complain about the results either. Oh, and this is the most important part : Hey all you politicians, I DO NOT COUNT. Remember, you do not have any reason to care what I think about anything or factor me and people like me into your decisions at all. We don’t vote so you don’t have to care about us! You know us, anything to make life easier for politicians. ”

That picture does not sound good to me, you know? So I vote. I think the rise of individualism has had, as an unintended consequence, eroded peoples willingness to participate in anything collective, or even to understand that such things are possible. There are a lot of things worth doing in this world which do not pay out in anything but satisfaction that you have done your part. There is no other reason.

I think if you put it that way to people, it might not make then want to vote right away, but it lays our the position very clearly and honestly and I think that will at least get people thinking. What kind of a point are they looking for in voting? A cash reward? Air miles? A ticker tape parade? What?

You get one vote, just like everyone else. Nobody has more votes than you. You get one vote, and while that might not seem like a lot, it it, both mathematically and politically, infinitely more votes than people of previous eras had and your one and only chance to put any pressure on the system at all, so you would be a complete idiot to waste it just because you are too lazy and too timid to learn about what is going on and form an opinion and then decide who gets your vote.

I know there is a lot of problems with modern democracy, and there are a lot of things I would love to change about this big old crazy world. There is a lot to complain about.

But you know what a very effective form of complaining is? Voting.

Otherwise, realistically, why should they give a shit what you have to say?

You have volunteered to not count.

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Cute! : Shelter for homeless cats

Sep 2

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, News, Odd | No Comments

Um, sorry, Robbery Story Lady. You just got bumped.

Now this guy who built a big cat rescue/cat haven on a tree farm is my Hero of the Day.

And it all started with one cat, his son’s cat, named Pepper. That cat is a hero too, because by getting to know that one cat, Craig Grant, founder, owner, and operator of the Caboodle Ranch, went from someone who thought they didn’t like cats to a man who has done more for cats in his area than probably anyone else ever will.

So here’s to Pepper as well. You made one heck of a convert.

He bought the tree farm, and as he kept acquiring more and more homeless kitties, he expanded the place, so all the kitties could roam free. But because sometimes kitties need shelter, he has also built his feline friends many, many beautiful “cat houses” for them to escape into when the weather gets wet.

Being a life long cat lover, I heartily approve. In writer’s terms, which is how I tend to think of things, he takes cats with often very sad stories before coming to him, and turns those into very happy stories as the cats go from the hard and cruel life of a stray to, essentially, Cat Heaven.

As I have mentioned before, I grew up in a house full of cats. My parents never quite intended to end up with eight cats, but they had two, and then a stray cat we eventually named Blossom adopted us by having a litter right on our back step, so we had her and her litter, and then she and her daughter Ace both got pregnant in the same year a few years later, and well, you can only give away so many kittens before the market is glutted and if you still have kittens left, they are yours forever.

And one of those cats from Blossom’s first litter, the very one who got pregnant with her later in fact, a smart little cookie my sister Anne named Ace after (I kid you not) Ace Frehly of the band KISS, worked a similar conversion as Pepper’s on my father.

In the past, my father had somewhat grumpily tolerated the cat pack we had acquired, but he was an old fashioned type of guy who thinks men like dogs and women like cats and that was fine by him. But that was not good enough for Ace. She set out to conquer him with charm by a very long campaign of sitting closer and closer to His Chair, going away when he shooed her but always coming back, wearing him down over time till she went from sitting near his chair, to sitting on the arm of his chair, to sitting right there in his lap getting petted and stroked and praised and using her surprisingly loud purr at maximum volume, looking downright pleased with herself for having, essentially, conquered Mount Everest in local cat terms.

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LOL : Clever license plate

Sep 2

Posted by MegaWordMan in Captions, Links | No Comments

I never thought I would find a license plate idea more cleverly dirty than good old A55 RGY.

Hey everybody, we're going to an ASS ORGY!

But that was until I saw this absolute gem of subversive content. Someone was clever enough to realize that their state’s license plate used a vertically symmetrical font, and then thought about how a lot of the time, you see people’s front license plate in your rear view mirror, and…

It says what you'll say right before the crash

Pure fucking genius. Imagine looking at your rear view and seeing that. In regular vision, it just looks like a random alphanumeric string. But in the mirror…. “OH SHIT”!

States and provinces have been really cracking down on people trying to put “inappropriate” things on their vanity license plates and so the would be prankster often has to be quite clever to sneak past the humorless public servants tasked with detecting such tomfoolery and rejecting the application before it becomes a license plate and, presumably, a threat to all that is good and decent on our highways.

Nudie mudflaps on your big rig are still fine, though.

So in order to get away with something like our star attraction up there, I imagine you need to not only come up with the proper alphanumeric combination, but a plausible and well rehearsed story as to why you want those particular numbers and letters. Because I imagine, by now, they have learned to ask, and if they don’t like your answer, they just reject your form anyhow.

So let’s see… this person had to come up with a clever explanation of what TIH2 HO meant. Maybe something like Timmons Industrial House 2 : Home Office. Claim it’s where you work, or something.

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LOL : Cool lady tells story of robbery

Sep 2

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | 1 Comment

I want this lady to tell me stories every night. In fact, I want her to have her own news program. The news would be so much cooler the way she told it.

Some outlets are calling her “crazy lady” or “eccentric lady”, and I say fie upon them for being tragically uncool. I think this lady is completely awesome and way more interesting than most of the people you see interviewed after the incident, whatever incident it was.

People just don’t know how to handle someone with such personality. But she is telling the story of what happened to her, and she is going to tell that story to absolutely everybody she meets for the next week or so, so she is taking the time and energy to make it come alive.

And it’s a gripping tale. It would be even without her energetic and expressive presentation. Being right there when the robbers come in, having one yell right at you to GET DOWN, scrunching back (quite wisely), deciding whether or not to faint (I don’t know about other people, but there have been times when I had the choice… felt it coming on but decided not to), and then, a surprise happy ending. The bad guys got shot and the good people are fine! Time for a fiesta gigante, mi amigos.

Now that, my friend, is a STORY. Big drama, personal danger, terror, the unknown, and big happy ending.

Damn, I want the movie rights. Not a long movie, granted, but as a short film, could be pretty good!

I get the feeling she was giving the camera the fast version of the story. I bet the version she tells to people who are not looking for soundbites will be longer and more elaborate, but no less entertaining.

She’s my Hero of the Day. Bravo, cool old broad with the smoker’s voice and the storytelling mojo!

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Music : “Fuck You”, version two

Sep 2

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Hey, remember this completely awesome song I linked to before? “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo Greene?

Well, now there is an “official” video for it. I guess the other one was what… unauthorized? Candid? Rogue?

Whatever. Here is the new one :

I tried really hard to keep an open mind about it, but I have to say : I like the first video better.

I tend to always like the first version of something that I encounter more than any others regardless. I think it is just the way my mind works. When I like something, I like every little detail of it, and so whatever the new version of it is, it can’t possibly compete. If I could somehow avoid comparing the two and pretend like the new version is an entirely new thing, I might be able to retain an open mind and appreciate both versions for what they are. But I find that extremely difficult and rarely succeed in it.

Plus, honestly, being a word lover, the original animated-text video just pleased me so much that it would be hard for any other video to suit me so perfectly. I love that kind of thing, where you hear and read the word at the same time and the text is animated to express the intent of the lyrics… it is like a brain massage for me.

For a rather extraordinary take on that idea, check out this video for “Lollipop” by Mika. It is not just a kick ass pop song, but the video makes passionate love to your eyeballs. Check it out.

Back to Cee-Lo : So with my tendency to love the first version I see, my love of the animated text style music video, and just how high the stakes were give how much the song itself turned me into a booty shaking, chair dancing, singing along except for a certain word fool, I guess it should surprise nobody that I don’t like the new video.

But still, all that taken into account…. I still don’t like it.

I think they were trying too hard. There is just too much going on in the video for such a simple, funky tune. A lot of the techniques and tricks are quite cool, but they did not need to use every single one of them. It is just too much, especially compared to the first video.

And um…. what the fuck is the deal with the backup singers being chicks in the video? They are clearly dudes in the actual song. I know having the three black chick Greek Chorus type thing fits with the overall diner setting and such, but come on. Did you think we would not notice black chicks singing like dudes?

It’s not a small detail, is what I am saying.

And there is something about the editing and camera style of the video that really bugs me. It seems like my eyes are constantly being directed right off the screen, or to the wrong part of the screen. You can’t afford to do that in a video that is already conveying a lot of information.

That said, there are some things I like. The acting job done by the kid in the first section is awesome. I love his little pissed off look. It spoke volumes.

And I love the whole (badly conveyed) arc of him getting his heart broken over and over by this girl only to come back to the diner as a big rich rock star and she is there sweeping and looking at him wondering what she turned down. Always a classic for us poor fat boys, that’s for fucking sure.

Too bad, bitch, you had your chance. I hope he married the nerdy chick with the glasses from the Teen Years, who turned out to not just have a crush on him, but be a really sweet and cool person who loved him for who he was, not just what she wanted out of him.

And that in addition to sweeping up the diner, the Heart Breaker also has three out of wedlock kids from three different flashy but no-good deadbeat fathers. Glad you went for the limousine types now, bitch?

As Cee-Lo so eloquently put it : “FUCK YOU. ”

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Journal : Long lonesome highway

Sep 2

Posted by MegaWordMan in Journal | No Comments

Watched the movie Prairie Home Companion (there is a movie about the radio show, if you like the show, get the movie, Robert Altman directed it) and there was a song which talked about the singer being grateful to all the aunt and uncles and parents and grandparents and other kin who had held her in their arms and guided and protected here, and it is a sweet song, but it made me think about how different from that my life has been.

I have been a profoundly alone and lonely person for a great deal of my life. Mostly, this began when I began school. I have already explained how I never went to kindergarten. Perhaps that is what started me off on the wrong foot, because it occurs to me now that it is quite possible that everybody else in my first grade class knew each other from kindergarten already, and I was, in their eyes, starting out as an insider. I don’t know.

But I never fit in or made friends. Actually, I am not sure that is strictly true. I think there might have been a period at the very beginning of my school life when I was getting along with my fellow students and was at least somewhat popular, and I think possibly a little redheaded kid named Trevor resented that and started making fun of me for being fat, and that was what ended it.

I have had trouble with various people named Trevor ever since. It’s odd how some names work out like that. I suppose I could hate little Trevor with the white hot passion of a thousand exploding suns, but what the hell, he was a kid too, and I am sure that if he even remembers it, the adult Trevor, who would of course be my age, would regret rising to social prominence by picking on the fat kid.

Or not. Whatever.

Anyhow, apart from that, I was a lonesome, friendless, isolated child who spent recess and lunch hiding from the torments of his fellow students. The teachers and administrators, I am sure, were quite aware of how badly my fellow students treated me. I know because in the beginning, I tried to tell them and get help. But it never worked. They would just say useless things like “Maybe you should try harder to get along” (so it’s my fault now?) and “They are just doing it because they are jealous of you” (…so you are not going to stop them, then?) and would, as often as not, force me to go out onto the playground and face possible abuse, when I would have preferred to stay inside where it was safe and read.

Jesus, no wonder I become agoraphobic.

So from a very early and tender age, I knew that there was absolutely nobody looking out for me. Nobody. Not my parents, who had no idea because I was afraid to tell them and get, as I have mentioned before, in trouble for having a problem instead of getting a solution or guidance or any help at all. My siblings were wrapped up in their own lives, and because the nearest to me is four and a half years older than me, they were largely in middle school already by the time I entered elementary. So they were not even in the same school as me, let alone around to help or protect me.

The teachers and administrators were obviously not looking out for me either.

I was completely abandoned and alone.

And really, that has never changed. The person I became in response to those conditions is pretty much the person I still am to this day. I have been that frightened sad lonely kid inside for thirty years.

And when I think of it, I just get this incredible sense of vast coldness. It was a very cold way to grow up. I think I retreated into myself in part as a response to that coldness. There was very little personal warmth or even human connection in my childhood and, honestly, not a lot in my adult life either, especially after I was pulled out of college.

That’s another story. Some other time.

There was definitely something wrong with myself as well, though, not just the system or my fellow pupils. And I am not just talking about being unable to rate to them because I was so intelligent and advanced as a student, and because dealing with them was nothing like dealing with my brainy family.

Something was wrong with me that went deeper than that, I think. I am guessing this is likely because of the sexual abuse I suffered. It is a hard thing to put into words, but I think there was always a sort of disconnected, otherworldly strangeness about me that probably stems from the abuse and the way my young mind dealt with it by sort of unfocusing and saying “I am not here, I am not here, I am far away, this is not happening. ” A fairly typical reaction, from what I have read in the psychological literature.

And I think that is where this unfocused quality which haunts me stems from. I am bright, but diffuse. It is very hard for me to focus on what is right in front of me. My mind has always been a million miles away in dream land and it has always seemed to me like reality was something I experienced at a distance.

So I guess when I went far far away in my mind…. I never really came back. Not all of me, anyhow.

Maybe not even most of me.

So perhaps I was alone not just because I had trouble getting along with my classmates, but because I was so very hard to reach. I did not know this, of course, although I am not sure I would have been able to do anything about it if I had known.

But there is a very real possibility that there were, from time to time, people trying to help me, but they just could not reach me across that vast icy expanse inside.

Maybe that long highway was lonesome for more than a few good reasons.