Regarding the fact that I rarely engage in conversation with other people

Humans.  What a nuisance.  If you saw the way I act around my neighbors, surely you’d know that this is the way I think.  I live in an eight-story building on the second floor, which is the ground floor.  I’m guessing there are twenty apartments here on the second floor and I know by name only two of the second-floor residents.  I know the name of one fourth-floor resident and there’s another resident whose name I used to know but now forget and I haven’t a clue what floor she lives on.  I have lived here since  September 2008.  Over three years, eight stories, three and a half names.  Since September 2008, I have conversed with only one of the three and a half people.  Twice, I think.  Add one or two other people to the mix for good luck whose names have escaped me now and that about sums it up.  Most of my private thoughts and things I say here in my blog about my neighbors are spiteful and bitter.  Sometimes, I get needlessly worked up in my spitefulness and bitterness and hatred and end up in a bad, bad negative space over this.  I have heard, “You should be nice to them.  You should treat the elderly with respect,” but I cannot feel sympathy for people who sit on their behinds and gossip, gossip, gossip all day long.  They don’t know my name even.  They haven’t asked what my name is.  They haven’t asked me what my dog’s name is.  They aren’t friendly to Puzzle or ever pet her.  This was established very, very early on, and I began the habit of sneaking in and out the back hallway to avoid walking past them and their gossip.  It’s very handy to have this back door my apartment door.  On my way out, I can walk down the back stairs and out the back door and be completely invisible.  Simple arrangement.  On my way back in, however, it’s a bit trickier.  I can’t enter through the back.  I have to go in through the side and then either up the elevator, or slide through the “community room” and up the back stairway again.  If I travel up the elevator, I might have to put up with some nosy person in the elevator with me, and then, the elevator exits into the main hallway, where I have to walk out where everyone can see me, and it just plain sucks.  I try to avoid the elevator routine, but I can’t always cut through the “community room” either.  Puzzle isn’t allowed to walk through there, for one thing.  I don’t go through there when they are serving “community lunches” in there, certainly not, because this is can be awkward as hell with my former neighbors in there, who make their indiscriminate comments about my weight.  I am not kidding you.  You wouldn’t believe the things they have said, or not said.  Maybe they just look me up and down.  That is bad enough.  At night there are the card-players I tend to avoid, building residents, gossipers I assume.  I look for a darkened room.  If it’s dark, then no one’s in there and it’s safe to walk through, go up the back stairs, and make a quick dash to my apartment door.  All this extreme effort just to avoid being seen by my gossipy neighbors.  Yes, I am rude, unfriendly, cold, aloof, stick to myself, not neighborly, the works.

My phone.  Yes, it does ring, but who calls?  Telemarketers and “professional fundraisers” on behalf of bogus charities that prey on the elderly and anyone else they think they can snare.  I get these calls about twice a day, maybe more.   Being on the National Do Not Call List hasn’t gotten rid of them.  What I am saying is, my phone is no longer a tool for useful, intelligent human conversation anymore.

Therapy.  I normally see my T twice a week.  Surely, this is intelligent human conversation.  But this week, I canceled not one, but both sessions.  Monday I was sick.  Thursday I was sick.  I screwed up somewhat the week before as well.  I can assure you that my T is very unhappy with me right now.  I can assure you that my T has possibly even fired me.  So much for further opportunity for intelligent human conversation.

Not that this is the only reason I go to therapy.  But the lack of human out-loud conversation this week has been so extreme that if it weren’t for the fact that I babble to myself non-stop every night as I’m headed to bed, I’d probably wonder if I still had a voice.  I had one phone conversation all week, and it was a good one.  I think this was Friday, at least I am fairly certain that it was.  Also on Friday, I stopped at the church and spoke with the minister.  I told him, very excitedly, about my new book.  I asked him what this Sunday’s sermon was going to be about, but then told him that I was going to be there Sunday, and that I’d wait and find out and be surprised.  So that was intelligent conversation #2.  The third was with my primary care doctor when I saw her Wednesday.

You know, I will go for days, sometimes, days and days, without talking to anyone intelligently.  Maybe a word or two to a store clerk.  Or maybe I’ll talk to people, but I’m so insane that the words just float around, or I fake my way through a conversation and I’m out of my head and pretend my head’s okay, I just smile and nod but I can’t even concentrate on what’s being said.  I haven’t been Stark Raving Mad, as I’ve come to call it, for a number of days now, thankfully.  I am hoping that this stays at a minimum.

Last Sunday at church I was Stark Raving Mad.  I was completely out of my head.  But I was still me, and church was still church, which meant that I was still just as welcome there and church was still just as wonderful.  I did have to fake my way through conversations during social hour, nod and smile and stuff, but I wasn’t connected enough to be scared.  I’d say it was so weird and interesting that I didn’t get a chance to be scared, not at all.  The Director of Religious Education read a story to the children during the service, while all the children gathered up front to listen.  I heard the title of the book, then the rest just went off somewhere.  I told myself that if this was going to happen with a children’s book, then the sermon was going to be really tough for me to understand.  But I wouldn’t say that this was exactly the case.  The sermon was simply a different experience.  I didn’t hear the sermon the way I usually hear sermons.  I saw it laid out before me.   Kind of like a puzzle or a skeleton or a graph, something bare-bones that had to be put together.  As is the tendency when I’m Stark Raving Mad, I get a thought, and then the thought completely leaves my head as soon as it comes into my mind.  So all this was happening with this skeleton before me that I was trying to assemble.  I heard the congregation laugh periodically.  I heard snatches of words here, then gone.  I felt a heat rise in my chest at the end of the sermon and I felt the warmth of the words as the flowed and spun around, and I thought that something was there that had to do with being held close and protected and loved.  Something happened in the congregation just then, a bubbling, and then a release.

It wasn’t until much, much later, that night, or maybe the next night, yes, probably the next night, and I think it was in the shower, that I looked back, and suddenly I was able to recall the entire sermon!  Yet I couldn’t comprehend any of it while I was sitting in the church last Sunday.  Why this recall?  Memory is a very, very strange thing indeed.  As I sit here right now I realize that it is late, and I am truly exhausted, and at this exact moment, my memory of the sermon is only vague.  I have yet to read the online text of the sermon.  These are generally available shortly after Sundays, usually Monday or Tuesday.

Tomorrow is Sunday.  I am not thinking of having the opportunity for human interaction tomorrow.  That’s not really my primary concern in fact.  I think what I’m more focused on is showing up for church on time and remembering my name button.  That’s very basic stuff.  Church is church and I’ll get to sit there and be there and that’s the important part.  The music will be awesome and everything will be awesome because it always, always is.

Showing up is awesome.  Remember this.

Oh yeah, the coffee afterward is a great bonus, too.

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