Ancient Misery, Part One

I figured out that if I take the leather case off my iRiver MP3 player it is a very svelte little package indeed.

I can slip it into my shirt pocket, run the wires up the back of my neck, stick the little earbuds in and I am walking in rhythm. Who needs this thick leather case? Without it, the player even looks better. This only took five months to learn.

The songs (several hundred from various sources, and the thing is like one-tenth full) are mostly upbeat, so it's supposed to keep me happy. There are a few ballads and nostalgic pieces, but mostly it's hard rockin'. This is not the soundtrack to my life. I wrote about this little box once before, and someone said "Great, you can create the soundtrack to your life." The problem is, the music just plays. There is no musical director who senses my mood, or prevailing conditions (horrible monster behind the kitchen door, for example) and adjusts the music accordingly. No matter what happens to me, the music plays.

No one else hears it but me, and with the invisible way I am wearing the thing, few even realize I am musicized. But when I feel kicked in the teeth, I want to hear "Man of Constant Sorrow," not "Hey Ya." I carefully chose those titles to be somewhat illustrative of what I am saying, without getting into extremely era-specific material, so you won't be picturing the real geriatric me, gimping around with an MP3 player hooked up like an oxygen tank. Anyone who cares to find out will know that I am 57 years old. Funny -- for the last twenty-eight years or so I have told people that I am one year older than I really am, so that on my birthday, when the actual age catches up, I will not feel so bad. I can't believe I cared about this when I was thirty. But when I signed up for this blog I dutifully reported my real birthday, and Blogger went ahead and calculated my age and there you go. It's right in my profile.

I'm a relatively young 57, not that it makes any difference. In the real world I am fitter, smarter and more creative and energetic than most guys I know who are twenty- and thirty-something. I have almost no nose hair. But blogging seems to be primarily the realm of twenty- and thirty-somethings, and in THIS world I feel impossibly ancient when I am reading a blog and the girl says"Eewww, this OLD GUY tried to hit on me at the gym, and I had to like, run." How old was he? Seventy? Or 57? I make a special point not to hit on anybody, but still. I don't remember being so mean to old guys or women when I was thirty. Maybe I just didn't have the venue.

More on that in a later post. For now, you kids should be ashamed.

I have been cut off. By someone who blogs. As I have said here in the past, I read a lot of blogs. I have read many great books in my incredibly long life, written by professional writers like Salinger and Dostoevsky, but these days I am really digging the amateurs, and I mean that in the sense of "volunteers," the bloggers who are telling their stories, expressing their feelings, telling on themselves, as another blogger put it once. There is something real and powerful about it that the pros often lack. And there's interactivity, by which I mean that I can comment, and the blogger gets to comment back, and we can find out about common ground, new ideas, stuff like that.

And I was doing this with this other blogger, thinking communication was happening, and then all of sudden she disabled comments and put up a post saying she was writing for herself and didn't want a conversation. I felt like I had been poked in the eye, since there were only like three people commenting and I was one of them. Funny how I can get to thinking that some kind of connection is happening in cyberspace (I know, but what other word can I use?) when actually nothing at all is going on.

And then before I can even fully wrap my mind around what happened there, or didn't happen, as the case may be, another woman (not a blogger) who has recently had a perfectly good chance at me and didn't take it, is heard to say that she needs to get laid, and has felt that way for quite some time. And, without going into all the intimate details, the situation she's looking for is pretty much the exact one I offerred. What's a boy to think?

I need no consolation here, people. I just want to know why all the shit has to hit the fan at the same time.

I am a man of constant sorrow.