Company

As a teacher who refused to write about his kids or job, I found that my own life did not give me as much to write about as it used to. Recently life gave me plenty to write about, but I do not want to write about it. I mean, I could. I might some day. But I do not think I will write anything about it today.

I will say that life is best experienced with other people. That sounds obvious, but men like the lone cowboy fantasy. John Wayne claimed to not need anything except his horse and a beer but allegedly died with 40 pounds of fecal matter in his intestines. The man was stressed out.

You reach a point in your 20s when making friends is not as easy as sitting next to someone new in class. If you are educated, then your friends probably have jobs and cannot play catch with you at the park. So you have at least some moments of solitude that do not seem entirely natural. Some stew. Some date. Others embrace the solitude as cowboys and cowgirls should.

I remember going out by myself for the first time. I was incredibly nervous. A game was on television, so I thought I would look normal sitting at the bar and watching. Of course the game ended as soon as I got through the door. Not knowing how to behave, I walked to the bar without bending my knees and elbows to embrace the cowboy inside, a newly discovered paraplegic infant underneath an imaginary Stetson. Or maybe I subconsciously felt all that fecal matter and knew that I would fall to the floor if I bent my knees. I just do not know.

"A grown, nondisabled man just walked in like a five month old," you might have whispered to your friend, not knowing it was me because you were afraid to look twice.

"What do babies walk like?" he would have asked.

"Never mind," you would have said. "Don't look. He is hideous."

The truth is that I did not have fun that night until my girlfriend came, and I doubt it had anything to do with my entrance. Not even drinking was fun to do by myself. My friends tell me that drinking by yourself is surely a bad sign. I think drinking by yourself and enjoying it is a bad sign. But who would enjoy that? Sometimes you just have to do it even though you do not enjoy it. That, to me, is a good sign.

That is all I have to say right now about the company of other people.