Resonance

[flexibeast]

One of my favourite books is Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto, by Anneli S. Rufus. When i first read it, i felt like i'd come home. What follows is a selection of quotes from the book which particularly resonated with me:

Our fuel runs out. This is what nonloners don't understand about us, what they cannot see. We do not choose to have such tiny fuel tanks. These can be quite inconvenient. They are why we seem rude, when we do, why we seem bored and often are. Spaced-out and often are. Running on empty.

As for sex, that level of intimacy lies at the end of a journey whose navigation no loner can take lightly. Social creatures, for whom saying hello is second nature and, it follows, can keep up light conversation in a crowded bar, have a knack for telescoping those stages between strangerhood and sex. Between them, it's just understood.

Savvy nonloners start networking during their college days, honing the social skills that loners often find ridiculous. For not having a clue, loners pay a price and keep on paying.

Granted, I do not know so many people, but nearly none of them ever ask me about writing. Not a word. How would they feel if I never mentioned their pregnancies, their children? Writing is practically all I do all day, every day, yet they talk about daycare and holidays and the assholes in the accounting department. Like the person whose dresser it is, they ask how I am but the question is general. As if how I am could be any other way than how I write. They ask how is my husband.

It's so easy, so comforting, in a way, for our observers to offer that explanation for what they find difficult to understand. He's crazy, see? It is a weapon. Do not mistake that for a second.

As a signal of civilisation, dressing is taken for granted. It is not a question of if, but what. Down these millions of years, it has become so de rigeur, so automatic, that many dress with amazing ease. They dress either without thinking or with regal deliberation, relishing the gradual accumulation of effects the way sovereigns must feel as silks and furs are drawn by servants up their arms and fastened as their necks. Each cloth and pattern proclaims some part of the body but, and more importantly, the body as the soul wants to seem. Dressing is an act. It is, tacitly, a relationship. In any case, besides dressing purely for warmth, it is an intercourse.

Idle chatter is the sound track to small towns, a music that drives most loners mad.