loneliness

Anthony Shriver, founder of Best Buddies, a nonprofit organization that helps people with intellectual disabilities form friendships, said smaller numbers will mean even greater social isolation for the people his group serves.

"Loneliness is one of the most significant challenges they face," Mr. Shriver said. "And it would only become more acute as they became a smaller segment of the population."

- from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/weekinreview/20harmon.html


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Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields.

Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?

-from Haruki Murakami's "The Year of Spaghetti"

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One read twenty minutes before the other, and in both, that word loneliness jumped off the page, had the effect of devastating me. I think I understand this concept perhaps better than I have at any other time in my life. That first article is heartbreaking, this forward march of the world and of medicine that resembles eugenics and allows for less and less difference. That short story is only a brief two pages and is so good, conjures loneliness so well.

I just messed up a chance to earn some easy cash seeing a regular that I like hooking up with. He was in a hurry and told me that he'd like to get together but that I would have to get there by four at the latest. And I like to dawdle around, taking my time getting ready and I made it nearly impossible for myself to get there on time. I arrived at the subway stop at 3:40 and the only way it would have worked is if the train would have arrived right as I got there, but the opposite happened, I just missed the train, and I waited around til 3:50 before leaving the station and calling the guy to tell him that I wouldn't have been able to make it by four. My own tardiness and laziness have shot me in the foot yet again. Not that I needed the money since I get a big paycheck on Wednesday, but I was planning on buying some expensive fun new shoes with that money this afternoon. I think that is something that contributed to my tardiness, daydreams of wasting money on things I didn't particularly need. The knowledge that I could have something prevented my possession of it. There is an analogy, a metaphor about life somewhere in this.