A Friendly, Non-Murdering Recluse

I’m a 61 year-old guy, and something of a recluse. Since the age of 21 or so I’ve almost continuously been in an adult relationship with one woman or another, but I’ve always lived alone, more or less. Usually (but not always) it has been I who has insisted on that living arrangement. When it comes to living my life, I am not a traditionalist. I’ve always made it a point to inform a prospective lady right up front that I am perfectly willing to be in a committed relationship, but I am not going to want to get married and start a family, and I will probably want my own residence. These ground rules have ended a number of relationships almost before they have started. But that’s okay. That’s why I am upfront about it. I don’t want to lead anyone on. I don’t want some sweet, unsuspecting lady to waste her time on me.

I don’t mind being by myself for hours, and even days on end. A coworker’s wife recently had reason to be out of town for a few days. My coworker told me that he missed her being around the house, and couldn’t wait for her return. I’m not quite that way. In fact, I won’t answer the front door simply because someone knocks. If I’m near the door, I’ll look through the peekhole. If I don’t recognize the visitor, I will not open the door.

Ted Kaczynski, perhaps better known as the Unabomber, was an Olympic-level recluse. He lived alone in some backwoods shack and used to go into town only when he needed supplies. I wonder how Ted interacted with people on those rare occasions. Was he polite? Was he a personable guy? Did he joke with strangers? My guess is that Ted was neither polite nor personable. I doubt that he displayed a sense of humor around others.

Sometimes I won’t leave my condo for two straight days and then I’ll decide to go to the grocery store. I’ve been known to jovially unload a shopping cart for an old lady in the parking lot on my way into the store. I will casually banter with store employees and customers while in the store. I enjoy being alone, but I like people too. Maybe I like people as much as I do because I don’t overdose on them. I don’t know, it’s just a theory.

Anyway, the point to all this is; if there’s some old guy living next door, and he keeps to himself, he almost assuredly is not a murderer or child molester. In fact, he might not even be a grouch. Personally, I would assume that he is probably a decent guy. I mean, look at Santa Claus; he is a recluse 364 days out of the year.     

Comment-Free Blogging

I recently watched the movie Julia & Julie on TV. The film is about two people. One is Julia Child and her early days in cooking, leading up to her first cookbook publication in the late 1940s. The other person is Julie, a woman who in 2003 decided to make every recipe in Julia’s cookbook over the course of a year, and write about her trials and tribulations in a blog.

As a guy who has a blog, I found this idea of Julie’s blog to be a bit puzzling, and perhaps simply improbable, although the movie was supposedly based on two true stories. See, Julie was putting a year’s worth of significant effort into an undertaking for the single purpose of describing it in a blog. How would anyone every come upon this blog? How would it ever get any readers? I have wandered around the internet, and I have come upon free, personal blogs with various themes. Some are cat-oriented blogs, some are car blogs, and some are food blogs. A lot of them haven't even a single comment at the bottom of their various entries from some would-be reader, and those that do have a comment or two seem to be from friends or relatives. Many, and in fact probably most of the blogs I have come upon are non-active. They have been forgotten by their creators. My guess is that they have been abandoned because they never found a reader. Now these blogs are like cyber ghost towns with a last entry in, for example, June of 2006.

As hard as it is to believe, I actually put some effort into my nitwitty blog. I mean, I come up with something to write about, usually jot down the idea so I won’t forget it, and then when I get to my computer, start in on the blog entry. Once I’ve written the entry, I’ll proofread it several times and make small, and sometimes even wholesale changes to it. The average blog entry takes me about an hour, all told. I think of it as a hobby. I would never go through any real hardship with the idea that I’ll tell the world about what I’m doing via a blog. No one reads an ordinary person’s blog. And I mean it really can be pretty much no one. And of course without a single reader, word-of-mouth is not possible, so “no one” usually remains no one.

So as I was watching Julia & Julie, I was wondering; who would brutalize himself or herself with a difficult task simply to write about it in a blog? Also, by the end of the movie, Julie’s blog had thousands of readers. How did that happen? For me, the whole blog-thing hurt the credibility of the movie. It just did not seem realistic. 

I’ve recently discovered that my blog has a feature that will not only give me the numbers concerning my readership, but in what country the readers reside. Over the last month I have had six blog entries and a total of four readers. That’s less than one reader per blog post. Of the four readers last month, one was in the United States, one was in Germany, one was in Russia, and one was in Latvia, of all places. That Russian reader must really be a fan. The months that I have but a single reader, that person is usually the reader in Russia.

I wonder if Julie’s blog was read by anyone in Latvia. It would be nice to think that it wasn’t. 

Finding Coins On The Ground

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I found a dime earlier today in a parking lot. The dime was scratched and scuffed up. It had been out there a while. Since it was still worth ten cents, I tucked it into my pocket.

When I was a kid, walking down the street, I would gleefully pick up a penny that someone had unknowingly dropped onto the sidewalk. I remember finding a nickel on the blacktop of my elementary school playground. I was about 10 years old and the find was significant enough that over fifty years later I still vividly remember it.

I have a friend who is truly poor. He will pick up a lost penny each time one appears. I haven’t picked up a penny in forty years. Part of that has to do with my improved financial state adulthood as brought me, but I think a lot of that has to do with the dwindling value of a penny. I will still pick-up a nickel, but it is very close call. If I’m walking down the street and I get a glimpse of an abandoned nickel as I’m passing by, I will not halt my stride and return to the site of the coin. I’ll just keep walking. If I’m standing at an intersection, waiting to cross the street, and I look down and see a nickel at my feet, I’ll reach down and retrieve it, assuming I have nothing in my arms hindering my downward bend. To me, the displaced nickel is right on the cusp of going the way of the displaced penny.

A few days ago I was about to put some money in a vending machine when a quarter slipped out of my hand, hit my foot, and was catapulted into the darkness under the vending machine. Ten years ago I would have gone to my hands and knees, looking for the quarter. Nowadays I give a brief look, shrug my shoulders, and chalk up the quarter as a loss, the cost of doing vending machine business.

Speaking of vending machines; I’m sure billionaire Bill Gates uses them occasionally. I have wondered what he does when he gets change from one. Does he reach down into the coin return and retrieve his forty cents? Figuring that Gates was worth $0 at birth, I wonder what his lifelong per second income is. If I were good at math I would be able to figure it out. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill Gates is worth something like $5.00 for every second he has been alive. Mathematically speaking, I’m sure Gates takes a financial loss whenever he bothers to fetch money from a vending machine coin return. So, does he bother?

This morning, when I found the dime, I picked it up and for a few seconds thought of myself as having a bit of luck, ten cents worth of luck, to be exact. Then I began wondering how long it will be before a forsaken dime will no longer be worthy of my rescue efforts. Probably not long, unfortunately. It seems that even luck can have a rate of inflation.

Cowboys and Tarzans

The other day I had more than the usual amount of spare time on my hands, consequently I began looking up on the Internet people from my past. I found Paul Green at Facebook.

From the late 1950s to early 1960s Paul Green and I were best pals. Between the ages of about 7 to 12 we were almost inseparable. We were a mid-20th Century Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

One Saturday afternoon Paul stood before about three or four neighborhood kids and proclaimed that toilet water was nothing more than tap water, “just like what you drink out of the kitchen faucet”. I had never given a thought as to where toilet water came from, but it just didn’t seem right that it was regular faucet water. But Old Greenie insisted that was exactly what it was. Obviously he needed to prove his claim, so a Tootsie Roll was tossed into a freshly flushed toilet with the instruction that if Paul really believed it was clean water, he would eat the candy. 

I can still see Green’s nervous facial expression as he stared at the dripping wet piece of brown candy, then slowly, reluctantly, inserted it into his mouth and began to chew. To this day I still don’t care about the origins of the water in a toilet, but I can say with complete confidence that it is ordinary tap water.

Green and I watched a lot of television together. We would often spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching some old movie being shown on one of the three local channels. One of the movies we saw was a western. I couldn’t begin to tell you which one it was, but I do know it made quite an impact on us two kids. We vowed to save all of our money so we could buy a ranch out West. We were going to carry six-guns, herd cattle, and after sunset, ride into town where we’d drink a little whiskey, and play some poker. For a week or so I actually saved some money to put towards this venture. I probably amassed about 9 cents.

A few months either before or after Green and I hatched the plan for the ranch, we saw a Tarzan movie and immediately vowed to travel to Africa were we would live together in the jungle. We had it all figured out. We would be two Tarzans, swinging through the treetops on vines, and using some distinct yodel-like call to summon all the jungle animals, should we need them. I liked the notion that there would be no more school.

These days I can easily see that the concept of two nearly nude Tarzans living together in the jungle might appear kind of gay. But at the time this plan was formulated, Green and I were perhaps all of 10 years old. Undoubtedly if we had retained the “Tarzan” scheme until the age of 15, it would have included at least two “Janes”, and perhaps more.

According to Facebook, Paul Green is the father of three, a grandfather of four, and a certified public accountant. I haven’t laid my eyes on him in over 40 years, but I’m sure he could still remember the kid with whom he used to hobnob. But if Paul’s Facebook photo suggests anything, it suggests that a lot of time has passed since those days, and that he, and probably we, are better off where we are because, well, we probably would be no match for a ruthless band of cattle rustlers.