Describe a time you felt alone

There is a danger in writing this. It is the same danger there always surfaces in writing. You show too much of yourself and people learn about you in ways you never wanted or you do not show enough about yourself and the writing becomes stilted, stale, dead. The problem is with finding the balance. Well to hell with balance!

I hardly knew her I tell you. I had just met her when this happened. You can't blame me for this!

You can't blame me...

No I can blame you. I can blame whoever I fucking want. Blame does not request acceptance. I can throw my blame at you like a ball of knitting wool. Throw my little black balls on you and they will stick on you whether you reach out for them or not. Here! Catch!

There is no time I remember I was not alone. I am not talking about the feeling of loneliness of not having people around. I am talking about the visceral, gut wrenching loneliness of being alone around other people. Being around people who theoretically are your people. I am talking about the pain of little blind worms eating you from the inside out, hollowing out your body by eating one organ after the other, heart and brain and eyes until the only thing left standing is but a shell.

It's the unbearable knowledge that you are for ever the outsider. The person who looks in from the lighted window, who lurks on the marble steps or under them - if you really want me to get Gothic on you. 

The strange thing is that at first you are alone because this is how life is. Some plants flower amid rocks, others try to grow roots in the asphalt. This is life. Then, later on, you are alone by choice. And here the plant analogy fails. Forget about it, will you?

Practise as they say, makes perfect. Perfect though does not imply proper, does it? It just means you get really good at what you do, whether that is playing a Paganini piece or twirling yourself around and around in your socks on a polished wooden floor or banging your head against a wall till you no longer feel it.

Thus it goes with being alone. After a while you are alone by choice. You remove yourself from human company. It is easier than facing the constant reminder that you do not belong or as Christy Moore says in Ewan McColl's song "You'd better get born in some place else. So move along, get along, Move along, get along, Go! Move! Shift!"

I am cheating here of course. Or maybe I am not. Who gives a fuck?

There is a thing though that might be wrong and a mistake. And that is to assume that the person who is alone is miserable and deserves your pity. "Poor dear. All alone. Lets be humane and offer our condolences and well wishes to this poor, poor dear." I sincerely hope you will not do that. Unless you do wish to drink your meals from now on, or you wish your car to mysteriously, spontaneously combust, while you are in it.

So next time ask me to describe a time when I was not alone, will you?

What 5 websites do you visit often, and why?

There is something obsessive, something remotely religious about the way she checks these websites. Infinately disorganised, excessively random, regular like clockwork though with regards to her web habits. It's not hard since that's her IRL.  Her friends are there and her loves. Shake your head at her at your peril. You don't know her and she doesn't know you. Please keep your fundamentalist judgements to yourself...

If she lived in another century she'd be training carrier pidgins; or carrier rats. She has no idea if rats have a homing instinct... Still... The first website is Gmail. Checking messages and notifications. That little counter on the top of the Gmail tab in her browser is ticking away her day. One new mail message.   "Cue" and a great big smile appears on her face. "We have received your application and we will inform you as soon as possible...". "Hello blossom". There also have been the sad messages or at least the messages that made her sad. Each message is a bet, a gamble. Thank whomever for Gmail's junk email filter for at least removing the obvious rubbish.

Next then is the facebook tab. The instantaneous communication, the "Hi, I am here" moment. Up goes the photograph she snapped while going home, the song that she was whispering all day, the awful burden of another unsatisfactory day in the salt mines. There is a ticker on the top of this tab too. Grab your tea and come over and tell me, how's your back? Did the biopsy results come in? How was your trip? Tell me, when are you coming over? There was a birth, a death, a wedding in our family. I had a ham and double cheese sammish for lunch, are you still eating that turkey?

Then there is KoL and Glitch. Both are games. There is no way she can explain their allure to you. So lets not get into unnecessary details.  There is no way she is giving you her nick either. Maybe if you ask nicely though she will perhaps send you some meat and a piggy cubimal. Games are the ultimate procrastinator. Lets get this emblem shall we? Oh! It needs one to spend three months of playing every day to get. No worries! Beats bashing her head against the wall, over peer reviewed journals.

Then there is... heh... yes the mystery webpage. The one where she sits and listens to the universe talking. Listens and smiles or tears up. Narration upon narration of every day things. Memories and things happening now. Sexy things and sober things. She goes there often day or night, to listen, to put her hand out and touch the pulse of real life beating steadily in the carotid artery of the web.  It's her secret and her joy. She always ends up there or on to the sister site where the universe's eyes reside. She likes seeing through those eyes that pick up minutiae and expand them so they fill the event horizon.

Smoke and mirrors baby!