According to Spotify, Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” is in heavy rotation for me these days. 

I wonder…

I’ve been getting some weird invitations to lunch. They arrive in the form of mail flyers. They are addressed to me, in a way, Current Resident. So nice of them to think of me, I figured I’d give them the courtesy of reading further. One was for a urology seminar. Another was for a survivalist conference. A third was from a funeral home. Although they may think me rude, I passed on all of them. Lunch at a funeral home just makes me nervous. It’s like going for sushi at a bait and tackle shop. Too easy to mix up the inventory with the catering. I would hate to be halfway into my patty melt when a frantic mortician runs into the dining room and shouts, “Where’s Mrs. Burger?” 

Where, indeed. It’s an honest mistake, really, but one I’d rather not be involved in making. When a business ends up cremating a Cobb salad and preparing Mr. Cobb for the buffet, you can bet I’m not buying whatever it was they were trying to sell me in the first place. Likewise I’d have a hard time drinking the lemonade at a urology seminar, and my stomach turns at the thought of seeds and irradiated root vegetables at a doomsday convention. 

“You’ve gotta start eating small amounts of radioactivity so you can be prepared when all the bombs drop!” 

I decided, for the most part, to continue to dine at home, like a solitary man. Which led me to consider that I may be turning into a bit of a recluse. Maybe not as bad as B. Traven, Thomas Pynchon, Buckethead, or that hermit that wrote Beowulf, but certainly a fellow leery of mingling. I thought about it and arrived at two conclusions. 

The first is that the true solitary man is one by design. It’s not for a lack of anything better to do that he affects a certain isolation around himself, and it’s not for a defect in social etiquette that he doesn’t maintain a large circle of casual friends. Chiefly, a man is resigned to a life of lonesome meditation when, through the clarity of solitude, he discovers the secret peculiar to his existence. Every person’s revelation is different, and as such no one else can help him solve his own riddle. Likewise, once he has glimpsed a bit of his own blueprint, he is powerless to communicate it. The mysterious wellspring of his soul’s grand design becomes corrupted the minute he tries to explain it to another person, like a butterfly that loses its iridescence the moment it’s captured.

That, pretty much, is why the true solitary man stands alone. 

The second conclusion I came to was that it’s good to lay low because people are psychotic and will try to fucking kill whatever they can get their hands on. There’s murder everywhere. Sick lunatics are running amok with no other purpose than to maim, torture and destroy. And it’s not even the haters you have to watch out for; it’s the love that’ll kill you. 

One of the recent standouts is a woman named Jacqueline Ades. She is locked up, for the time being, at the Maricopa County jailhouse, but only after sending over 150,000 text messages to a fellow she went out on a date with once. On one level I’m glad I’m not the object of her “affection,” but on another level I’m kind of jealous. Nobody has ever cared that much about me to send an avalanche of messages the size of the Oxford English dictionary. 

The volume of her texts is one thing, the content is quite another. Ms. Ades seemed to come to the conclusion that there’s no better way to show someone you care than to send them a faithful list of gross-outs. Her electronic epistles declared her loving intentions to bathe in this fellow’s blood, wear the top of his cranium like a hat, slice him up for a fondue, and use his bones as chopsticks. She’s a creative sort, I’ll give her that. She’s also the Ed Gein of modern dating app users.  Her love notes were so depraved she could’ve given the Marquis de Sade a run for his money. That was when I hit upon an eerie realization; Ms. Ades’s last name is an anagram for Sade. Well, there it is. She may be the last true libertine, although she strikes me as more of an Elizabeth Báthory type, the Hungarian vampire countess who used to drain her servant girls of their blood for use in her beauty rituals, which never worked, given that she was about as homely as Quasimodo. 

If all that wasn’t bad enough, I then started to get a little jealous of how prolific Ms. Ades is. Anybody who can crank out a hundred thousand text messages in a few months is quite the dedicated writer. Not even Stephen King can write that fast. I sure as hell can’t. 

Which led me to a third conclusion: The solitary man stays that way because he doesn’t like to be reminded that there is always somebody out there doing it a little bit bigger, stronger, faster, or crazier. Then, I guess, I’ll be what I am. 

Sing it, Neil Diamond…

More Alembics…