embarrassingly lonely people. also flying. also falling.

Hello, readers.

Friday, being today, the day I finished Jimmy Corrigan, seems to be as good a day as any to think about loneliness and embarrassment. So, that is what I’m doing. They will very probably most likely feature in my next video blog. Things which might not feature in that video blog include:

1) Thinking of my father in the hospital and fainting upon seeing him in recovery.

2) Crying in the lap of a woman who was, at the time, the most important person to me in the world which was a weird thing to think about considering parents and, in particular, my dad having undergone surgery. Love does all kinds of wonderful-true-make-believe horror to reality.

3) Watching Parenthood with EG last night and feeling crushed by the thought of parents alone in their houses, knowing that’s how they must have felt, the parents, when their kids left and were, perhaps, sometimes alone in their new houses.

4) How much we long to connect to the loneliness in others and, in that connection, feel for some hope of the lifting of that loneliness, a feeling like flying together, rather than falling alone.

Actually, in fact, that last bit might make it into the video blog. And the others, will, perhaps, make their way in others or that video and, of course, make their way into everything I write, past, present, or future.

The thing about stories is how much they know about the past and future and a little bit of the present. If you want your future told, read a story and let it dream your future for you.

Something like that, readers.

Go read what Jonathan Lethem has to say. He’s smart.

I stitched together a notion: I’d be the American Calvino, but nourished by scruffy genre roots. As though this would comprise a movement or school of writing to contextualize lonely me. It just didn’t exist, that was the only problem. There was nothing there. I could declare it, and a few people would be gulled and say, Oh, you’re going to be that thing!— but only because I’d just described it with such energy and affection. But there’s no such thing.

Happy Friday, readers.

ttfn.