Alone... for some reason the word seems to be synonymous with tragedy. Perhaps we're preconditioned from the crib to think being by ourselves means being left out. The preacher tells us "man was not meant to live alone." Our families drill into our heads the importance of meeting someone nice down the block. In school, in the army, even in the neighborhood, the so-called "loner" is the outcast. The key word to getting through life, then, is apparently join.
—Rod McKuen from the back of his record Alone... picked up from the back of a box of records behind Recycled Records a few hours before the dawn of the 90th day I had a facebook account
The neighbor that blessed the air around our house with its linksys wireless internet has made a change. This change occurred around the 40th day I had a facebook account. This neighbor could have moved, perhaps decided to require password access to the household wifi, or maybe just stopped paying for the internet and—as I was forced to do—found it free elsewhere.
Around this time I committed to a facebook group "40 Days of Writing" which was beginning its second round on the 46th day I had a facebook account. I acquired a flash drive (thanks, Dad!) and made a habit of typing at home and then going to the library with some text nuggets encoded on my new 11th finger. I could not use my external hard drive for some reason I did not entirely understand: the male librarian said it was illegal to give me the access needed to make it work. Therefore the more secret agent-style flash drive. My external hard drive does look like the device which John Connor uses to make the ATM spit out money in Terminator 2, and which also gives him access at the crucial moment in the end (I don't want to spoil the film for those who have not seen it with specifics). It made me feel like I was a discontent with a brilliant freedom-fighting plan, uploading anarchistic dispatches covertly on the government's dime.
It also made me feel like an asshole for going to the Pacific Grove Public Library to check my facebook. Seriously, what the fuck I had I become in such short months? In the minds of those citizens passing by my computer in the library and seeing the blue-topped iconography of present day superficial society, I wasn't participating in a meaningful writer's challenge, nor was I using facebook as the subject of the writing to which I was challenged. I was just a kid hooked on social networking with insufficient technology to get his fix in private.
Also, I kind of was. Days would pass without internet access and I would wonder...
Are people interacting with me right now?
Is someone trying to get my attention right now?
Am I social networking right now?
And I would squeeze in 30 minutes of library internet access on my way to work, upload an essay on the Terminator movies, check my facebook, and get to work late, not satisfied, needing to go again the next day.
I remember years ago in college when I would go to the library between classes to access the internet for half an hour and I would write my friend Brendan a 6-or-so paragraph email describing the significant thoughts and emotions of a few days' span, and I would be done with time for a cigarette before class.
What happened to that kind of writing every day? The kind that came natural and easy?
Yesterday morning Brendan woke me up with a phone call, first apologizing for not responding to an earlier phone call, and then (still being asleep I don't think I was in the presence of mind to necessarily judge it a non sequitur) asked me how I remained motivated in my writing.
Though I know this is not what Brendan had in mind (while, again admittedly, I was asleep, I know his warm personality well), this could be construed as a cruel joke—it was 9:30 and I was not writing, I was sleeping. The day before I did not do any writing, and it was my second day off from work in a row (on the 1st I also did no writing), which followed a week where I did no writing (I edited something).
Am I motivated in my writing? I am alseep. I mumbled something about facebook and we chatted about something else and he got another phone call. Isn't not writing an important part of the writing cycle? If writing is to be natural and relevant it cannot be forced. It must therefore lie (lay?) fallow. It must not be to show that it was and will be again.
It was becoming clear a certain phase of my life was ending, and that I needed to get real to that. Death was overwhelmingly present in all that I encountered. And the existential cliché that the only truth was death followed me around like an angsty adolescent sidekick.
On the 79th day I had facebook our house was gifted two massive boxes of VHS tapes. On the 90th day I finished the last episode of the second season of the Sopranos. I watched every episode by myself. I posted nothing related to the Sopranos on facebook. Death is very real, life is quite absurd, and Anthony, Jr. pronounces Nietzche "niche."
On the 86th day I had a facebook I bought—for 50 cents at my favorite Salinas thrift store—a 1962 anthology on "Alienation in Modern Society" called Man Alone, which is filled with quotes like this (respectively from The Transformations of Man, by Lewis Mumford and "Alienation Under Capitalism," by Erich Fromm):
modern man has already depersonalized himself so effectively that he is no longer man enough to stand up to his own machines... By perfection of the automaton man will become completely alienated from his world and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine.and
man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished "thing," dependent on powers outside of himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.The 86th day I had a facebook was also the 40th and last day of the "40 days of Writing," a day I earlier considered an appropriate last day for my facebook account, its midnight ripe for a symbolic termination. I neither wrote anything nor deleted my facebook account. I did go to a pool party which produced a photo (myself in a bath robe with no shirt, a beer and unkempt hair) that instigated a brief spat between myself and my mother who posted a snarky comment not realizing the context for my appearance. We reconciled over the phone.
On the 89th day (well really the morning of the next day) I had a facebook I found, among half a dozen other records I took home, a copy of Rod McKuen's Alone in a free box in the parking lot behind Recycled Records. A few hours earlier a man dressed in all black entered a midnight showing of the new Batman movie opened fire 20 miles away from Columbine High School.
On the 92nd day I had a facebook I saw La Sera play in Seaside. They were asked to play an encore, an obvious moment for the appearance of a meaningful sign, and they played "I'm Alone". After the show I asked Katy Kickball Goodman if I could purchase a record that had that song on it, as I have been encountering, experiencing, and reflecting upon themes of loneliness, and that I had been experimenting with a facebook account, trying to decide if it makes me feel more or less alone. I bought two of her tapes and have listened to them on loop, infatuated.
On the 91st day I had a facebook I cut my own hair while watching the 3rd and 4th installments in the Beatles Anthology, trying to pinpoint the replacement of Paul McCartney by Billy Shears. I had been watching them backward and experienced the story in the frame of mind that the only truth about the Beatles was that the Beatles had to end. A few weeks before a friend had post(ulat)ed on facebook that the Beatles stopped being good at the release of Rubber Soul. Another agreed it was around that time they stopped wearing suits and therefore stopped being the Beatles. They also stopped touring. And it was also around this time that Paul died.
Considering this, the narration of the anthology is a bizarre tapestry of death—John's side of the story is presented by audio and video interviews in the decade after the Beatles and before his shooting, George is interviewed in the last decade of his life, and Paul—if we read Billy Shears as BS, as in at a certain point Paul became full of shit and ostensibly (if not really) dead—is interviewed while captaining a boat, stoking a fire, wearing a vest with a white t-shirt underneath, in the recording studio, etc. talking about how a moment of recorded feedback in "I Feel Fine" was responsible for the experimentations of Jimi Hendrix (who interestingly had performed a cover "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" before the record had coming out, allowing himself "to introduce to you the one and only Billy Shears." He got the joke. Paul is BS. Jimi is also dead.
On the 94th day I had a facebook I went to a baby shower at a vineyard on top of mountain, shaved my beard and commented at work that I felt born again. I fell asleep listening to the new episode of Radio Lab, "After Life." There was a segment describing the life of people after they pass, as they exist in the minds of those on whom they had made an impression. Even if I deleted my facebook, I would still exist in a real way on the facebooks on whom I had made an impression. I had always been on facebook, after all. I just could not be labeled in photos, like a ghost can't be clearly identified.
Just as I had woken up with a brief conversation with Brendan that morning, and with a certain clarity—writing, existence, and my actions in perspective, in balance—I fell asleep with everything making vague, satisfactory sense, with Radio Lab creating a soundtrack to passing on to the other side.
I remember a man describing his attempted suicide, his jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And I thought about the man describing my relationship to the termination of my facebook account.
It's time to do it. You've got to this. I really believed that everybody would be better off without me. That everybody would just get on with their lives feeling better about me being gone than me being here.... And the last things I saw leave the bridge were my hands, and that moment, that very moment, I said "Oh, my god...this is a mistake."He was one of rare exceptions to survive the jump, but among the overwhelming many who, in those four seconds between the bridge and the water, decided they wanted to live. He tried to kill himself and survived on August 20, 1985, 10 days before I was born. From the violent forces of the universe and the great waters of the Pacific we found land, existence, and meaning as Indian Summer set in on the west coast of California.
...If I'm alone
by now it's by design.
I only own myself
but all of me is mine
—Rod McKuen,
from the back of The Loner and 13 other Rod McKuen songs of love and loneliness
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