Connective Tissue

Cannot believe how bent out of shape all that mishegas over the last few days made me feel. Maybe an angst-addled teenager feels emotions like that, but a grown-up? Never. A woman of 60? Puleeze.

A very borderline personality type of energy, really.

I imagined trying to explain it to someone, nose running, crying hysterically: They think I'm a bad person, and that makes me a bad person –

And having that someone make a wry face, shake his/her face: Actually, no. It doesn't. Only you can make you a 'bad person' –

Finally snapped myself out of it by going to bed and watching – in rapid succession – Argo and the latest episodes of Shameless and The Good Wife. A while ago it occurred to me that the one note of continuity in my life after I was uprooted from my home was really the cozy, comforting voices of the NPR anchor people on Morning Edition. I had listened to them every morning before I took the dogs to the beach in Monterey, and then again on my way to the Little Store. I had listened to them the whole five months I trailed after the circus, following the elusive arrows, and I listened to them all winter long shivering heartbroken in the Concrete Bungalow.

It's kind of bizarre that the true connective tissue for me is not relationships with other people – E.M. Forster's imperative: "Only connect!" – but the voices of people I'll never meet, and who I wouldn't recognize if I saw on the street. Honestly, though? I think that's the case with a lot of people.

The Gallaghers comfort me. Alicia Florrick comforts me. The plight of the House Guests in far away Iran distracts me and comforts me. (It was actually suspenseful – rather a tour de force for Ben Affleck, I thought, given that the historical outcome of that particular sequence of events is very well known.)

These TV shows and movies, the tremendous numbers of books I read, these imaginary narratives – they're my real connective tissue. I suppose in a sense this makes me a kind of cousin to Chance the Gardener in Being There or Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer.

Is that pathetic?

Honestly? I don't know.

Human beings are social animals after all. So I'm always going to feel a great yearning for a group, a family, an inner circle of kindred souls I can belong to.

It would no doubt be better for me psychologically if I found these cosmic littermates. I'd be happier.

But I think I am just too odd and strange and -- let's face it -- old to find that group.

Plus, all it is is a neurologically mediated herd instinct, mediated by oxytocin and serotonin and whatever other chemical endocrines and hormones are responsible for feelings of love and acceptance or, alternately, for feelings of despair. It's not as though the group membership conveys any special grace. In the end we all die, and eventually we're all forgotten. Right? Right.

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In other news, I have another date with an Online Dating Website dude tonight. Had a long telephone conversation with him last week and I ascertained I have absolutely nothing in common with him. I'm curious to see if he's at all physically attractive. He's very sane, upper middle class bourgeois. Can't imagine why he would be attracted to me. There's nothing about me except my physical appearance that would appeal to him in the slightest.


But I'm kind of thinking that if he's physically appealing, I might sleep with him.

I relayed all this to Clark on the phone. He started to sputter. "You are so cold and calculating!"

"Me?"

"You! Listen to yourself!"

This sort of shocked me. I'd thought if anyone would understand that choice, it would be Clark.

"Well, I've got to climb back on the bicycle at some point, right?" I said.

Clark snorted. "You make it sound so-o attractive! Like you're a sacrificial virgin waiting for Cthulu to rip your heart out –"

"Well, I think I'll enjoy it more if I can control it, right? And I can control it better if I feel absolutely no emotion –"

"So cold," said Clark. I could imagine him shaking his head. I couldn't tell whether this behavior disgusted him or on some level he was secretly charmed by it.

But my emotions are very strong and in general, very misguided. It would be better not to feel a real emotion ever again in my life, as far as I'm concerned.

I will also see the nice gentleman I met for coffee last week either this weekend or early next week. He used to import gems from Southeast Asia and is also a docent at the Museum of Natural History, my favorite place on the planet. We have a lot of things in common, actually. He likes to go on long urban tromps and so do I. I want to stare at strange architecture and hear all about Myanmar, Thailand and Bhutan.