Lonely

The art of being lonely is a shrewd one. It’s cool to be free and all that. My time and my money belong to no-one but me. But tonight I went to a concert and then ate supper alone. Standing in a room full of people or eating at the bar (because that’s where they put you when you are a party of one) falls a little short of the full experience.

That ultra-stupid song, “Lonely. I’m so lonely. I’ve got nobody for my own.” keeps popping into my head. I’m the guy that hums the McDonalds tune until another song or t.v. commercial replaces it so it’s unavoidable really. Whatever happens to be on my mind works its way through the neurons and synapses in my brain and somewhere along the way gets turned into the tune that most closely matches the message.

The trick is to make sure that when you’re in a crowded room you hum quietly in your head and not so anyone else can hear you. Occasionally I do slip and that always draws looks of suspicion from whoever happens to be close enough to hear. There’s no coming back from that either because people generally avoid conversation with those deemed to be “not right”.

Gone are the romantic images in my mind’s eye of the cool loner that everyone secretly admires and wants to be like. I used to want to be Brad Pitt’s character from that movie, “Legends of The Fall”. But now I realize that he wasn’t cool. He was just lonely.

At my last count I had 507 friends on Facebook. Many of them are genuine friends and not just Facebook ‘friend’ friends. But tonight as I stood in the Cannery Ballroom on 8th street in Nashville, watching James Morrison I sort of wished that one or two of those friends were with me.