How To Be A Loner
Charles B. Lawson
The secret to being the perfect loner is pretty simple for the most part; you just don’t have to be interested in people. The title for the piece, How To Be A Loner, is one of the many titles that went through my head before sitting down to write this. My bartender suggested the title, A Reluctance To Settle For Mediocrity. The fact is this isn’t so much a piece about how to be a recluse or the outlier of society, it’s more about my life in college and my life in general. This is how I’ve gone about my business, my dirty life and times if you will.
There came a point in college where after years of dating and going out and searching for love I just lost interest. As Charles Bukowski once wrote,
I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with
the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become
edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of
humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
I had felt that and I had lived that way and I certainly did not want to go back to that any time soon, I didn’t want to waste my college years with one person missing out on things I would regret later.
To take care of this problem I simply did what I had always done before, drink. To meet someone for the first time can be pretty challenging even more so with the first kiss and the first fuck. That would be true if I were in the real world, but I was in college the last place for men to hangout where women just come to them. All women are interesting in their own right, they all have their own stories and experiences. I wanted to learn those stories and soak them up. I wanted to be with them if only for a few short hours, if you stick around too long their flaws become more and more apparent and the madness sets in. So every day in class I made the great spectacle of being me with my jokes and answers that I went out of my way to present in a cocky arrogant manner. Most people hated it, but there was always that lonely girl with daddy issues who found it charming would send me a message on Facebook.
Other than being a cocky prick who knew everything I also spent more and more time at the bar without my friends. Some nights you just get bored and go looking for whatever hood rat pops up and tells you she thinks you’re funny. I never went to parties though, I strongly dislike parties. It’s easy to find someone at a party but all the extra stuff of having to put up with people who pretended to be sexy and witty and ultimately fail at it are not worth the trouble. It’s nothing but boring games, be them board games or flirting. All the amateur drunks wandering around making up how many beers they had is like listening to high schoolers rant about their greatness. Everyone talking about the new fad because people have always grabbed on to whatever is there to fill their dull lives be it: god, vampires, games of hunger, alcohol, gambling, racing, video games, frozen yogurt, Kony, juicers, Nook, rusted tin roofs, drainage ditches, sex scandals, humpty dumpty, invented words that end with “tron”, the triumph of death, sauerkraut, the laughter of the damned, and whatever else people talk about that I randomly hate. Pandas…
It took a lot to be a true cocksmith in college, it certainly wasn’t for everybody. There were always the free spirits or swingers out there who just fucked for the hell of it. Those people simply had no morals though. They had nothing to cling to they just wanted to fill that empty void that grew inside them year in and year out. They had no feelings or remorse. I on the other hand wanted to live with the woman I was with. I wanted to eat with her and sleep with her and watch movies together. I wasn’t so much interested in going out or having any real conversation though, after two weeks all the romance is gone in any relationship and I did my best to keep that two week limit. Always loyal in intentions but never loyal in action.
After a while things begin to take a toll on your body though. All the juices have been drained and you are worn out and hung over. You sit around and consider your choices, the fact is when you looked at the overall picture drinking was probably the easiest way to go there were no emotions or drawn out conversations about love that made you want to vomit. Sex causes more problems than it’s worth sometimes, plus meeting women and telling them your name was Henry Longfellow or Lancelot Lovejoy wasn’t as funny as it use to be. Luckily when I was realizing these things it was always around the time of finals and I could just claim to be studying.
Since graduating college many things have changed in my life and many more have stayed the same. The fact is a good woman scares the shit out of me. It’s easy to say the women that love you are crazy and blow them off; mostly because those women I’ve found truly are insane. But actually attempting to be a good person and take things slow with a woman is beyond scary. You worry that sooner or later you are going to piss them off, personally the drinking has always taken care of the great ones. This new chapter in life is a challenge because everyone is eccentric. If you find something worth fighting for you should always give it your best shot and if it fails at least you tried. You can always go back to being a cocksmith and ranting about how the hand job is a forgotten art form. In the end no matter whom you are it never feels right being alone, it can feel good sometime, but it never feels right.
Charles B. Lawson is a A bar stool prophet with a degree in History. He can be found at http://
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