Cancer killed my mother. A stroke killed the only aunt I was ever close to. Heart disease killed my two best friends and my father. I could go on and on, but it's like my mother once said. "Everyone dies from something." Occasionally I'll see statistics about the killers of most people, things such as heart attacks, cancer, flu, and so on. I never one time have seen loneliness listed as a killer, but it is. It will never go on a death certificate as the cause of death, but it is responsible for the deaths of quite a few people.
We've all experienced spells of loneliness. Everyone knows what it feels like to be lonesome, but that's a different thing. Lonesome is an active thing, something that comes on a person when they spend too much time alone. There's an easy fix to lonesome, but dealing with loneliness is something more demanding and difficult. I find myself getting lonesome from time to time, and that's when I seek out someone to visit with. An old fart like me can always find another old man willing to swat tall tales with him, or at least I can. But I can't get over being lonely for people and things and places no longer around. I can't pick up the phone and call my mom, can't run across town and visit with a friend who died ten years ago. I can't go back to the town where I was raised because like me, it grew up and changed.
I can't go to a drive-in movie theater or even look forward to seeing a caboose on a train. I can't go to a downtown drug store and buy a soda, and there's no old time hardware store around these days. Loneliness is a product of outliving the things you got used to, the people you loved, the places that changed or don't exist anymore . . . and it's a killer. Old people like me have to fight off this loneliness, find ways of dealing with it, or it will eventually lead us to something sociologists call disengagement. We'll pull away, or pull back into a shell because we don't understand or like the world around us anymore. We have to fight back, or loneliness will eventually be a heart stopper. We'll reach a point where we just don't want any more of it.
I hate cell phones with a passion, but I have one. I don't like computers either, but I spend up to eight hours a day sitting at one. I can't get by without these things anymore, but that doesn't keep me from feeling like I've been left behind. The train of modern digital conveniences pulled out of the station while I was still in the bathroom. I'm surrounded by digiheads, tecno-retards, electronic gizmo button pushers, and brain dead doodadders. My vehicle holds me hostage ever time I get into it because I can't trust a machine that talks to me, and worse yet makes me do what it wants to do. My wife loves it, has our cell phones programmed with its system . . . and now the damn car is calling up people for me. Yeah, I get in the thing and a voice says, "What do you want?" And I say, "Who the hell is this?" And the voice says, "It's Craig. You just called me." And then I have to sound like a total fool and say, "No, that was Dotson (that's my Explorer's name) calling. I'd let you talk to him, but he's driving right now." It's a killer, I tell you . . . a sure enough heart stopper.
I wonder if anyone ever blew their head off over a cell phone, or over an automobile computer system. Lots of people have been killed using them while driving, but I've never heard of anyone killing themselves over some infernal contraption. I'm sure it has happened, but I've never been that desperate due to frustration that comes from dealing with a contraption. But I can see it coming. The doors to my vehicle automatically lock when you put it in gear and start to drive. I'm accustomed to the sound now, and I don't mind it. But some day I'll get in, the doors will lock, and a voice will say, "Sorry, Phil, but your time's up. This is a call from God, so please pull over and accept your fate. We wouldn't want you hurting anyone, would we now?"
I'm thinking of finding the fuse box on that vehicle and taking out some fuses, but I'd still have the damn cell phone. I'm living a digital bad dream, and I want to wake up. I'm lonely, dammit! I want to wake up in a time and age I understand, but we all know that won't happen. As bad as I hate it, I'm going to have to go digital. Da, dit, da, dit, da, dit!!!
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