Chapter 35: When in life have you felt most alone? What gave you strength during those times?

Originally written August 17, 2021

Just a lonesome AI clown in a bar that resembles a Taco Bell

I’ve lived alone most of the time since my youngest child, Anton, graduated from high school more than 10 years ago. Anton did spend most of his summers living at my house during his college years.

But since he graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2015 and moved to Austin, Texas — where his sister has been living since a few years before that — basically I’ve been the only human in the house most of the time. [Note from 2024: Since this was written both of my children have fled the state of Texas for brighter locales.]

However, I very rarely feel “alone and forsaken,” as Hank Williams used to sing. I’ve taken a few strolls down Lonely Street, but unlike Elvis, I never really felt so lonely I could die.

Here’s what Hank’s talking about:

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always valued solitude. Back in the ‘80s I wrote a sad little song that I rarely, if indeed ever, performed in public.

The melody was kind of wimpy and the lyrics a little too sensitive and introspective for my usual wahoo Potatohead crowd.

The first verse went:

They say I was a weird one when in second grade

I’d go off alone while the other kids played.

And though I was different, I was happy

For I’d be with my friends that only I could see.”

The song was called “Invisible Friends.” (Neil Diamond had already broached that subject a couple of decades earlier with “Shilo.”)

Later in my song, my second grade teacher intervenes and tells me that my invisible playmates were all in my imagination and I should let them go.

This also was true. Kind of. In real life the teacher called my mom to say that she was concerned and it actually was my mom who told me I should play with real kids, not my invisible friends.

I realized later that in the song, the teacher comes off as a villain. Actually, Mrs. Maney was a sweet old lady (Hell, she almost certainly was younger then than I am now) whose concern for me was genuine and not misguided. And she always was one of my favorite teachers.

But the point is, even though these imaginary beings undoubtedly sprang from my loneliness and shyness — I’d gone to first grade in Albuquerque, where we’d lived for a year after my mom remarried, so I was at a new school for second grade and hardly knew anyone there — I coped by creating friends inside my head.

(Or maybe I opened myself up to meeting benevolent beings from the cosmos if you want to go that route.)

So being alone never has been something I dreaded.

Around the time I got divorced from my second wife in the early 1990s I’d been listening to an album by Loudon Wainwright III that had a song called “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” which sums up how I felt as my marriage crumbled.

Sing it, Loud …

I’ve been known to go to movies alone, usually, but not always during periods when I’m not dating anyone. I’ve gone to many concerts alone, though in Santa Fe I know so many people it’s hard not to run into and hang out with people I know.

These days when I travel, I usually go alone, though often I’ll get to hang out with friends, acquaintances and/or family when I travel to an unfamiliar city.

When I first hit a town I’m not familiar with I love to walk around the streets taking in the sites, smells and sounds like an archetypal lonesome stranger, imagining myself as Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, though this probably sounds more like Pee Wee Herman: “I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel …”

I was never alone in Dublin. Shane MacGowan always was with me

Lots of people who live alone found the COVID lockdown of 2020 extremely lonely and depressing.

My worst moment came in the very early days of the pandemic. I got very sad when I had to cancel a planned trip to Austin in early April, 2020 because I’d been so looking forward to see my kids and grandkids there.

The day I cancelled my reservations I made a frustrated Facebook post that began “God damn it to Hell …” A Facebook “friend” who I’ve never met in real life (are Facebook friends the “invisible friends” of the 21st Century?) scolded me, as if he thought I was one of those ignorant Trumpanzis screaming at Wal-Mart employees for asking him to put on a mask.

I already was hurting from having to cancel my trip, so I basically told this guy that he was an insipid ninny.

He unfriended me.

No big loss.

But the initial shock of the lockdown and the sadness I felt having to cancel that trip did not result in any lasting depression.

I did get a little depressed around Thanksgiving that year, when it was becoming more and more obvious that my usual holiday vacation in Austin was a non-starter that year.

Another non-starter in 2020: “Truckstop Thanksgiving,” a fairly recent family tradition in which, the week before the actual holiday, I get together for a great meal at the truck stop at San Felipe Pueblo with my brother, my sister, my niece Lauren and her husband and any other family or old friends who are around. (More on this family holiday tradition in an upcoming chapter.)

But I wouldn’t call that depression last November anywhere close to crippling.

So let’s conclude this with the final verse of “Invisible Friends”:

There’ve been times since I’ve grown up when I’ve gotten out of jams

Where I must have been aided by some unseen hands.

And though I haven’t seen them since I was a kid,

Maybe I turned my back, but maybe they never did …

Alone again, naturally

Meanwhile, see you on the avenue …