So I joined Facebook, and now I feel like I used to at a certain kind of house party, where everyone else was chattering away and moving between the kitchen (drinks) and the living room (music, people) with great purpose and many nods of recognition. Everyone else, not me. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing there. So I hung around the edges for a while and then either got drunk or found someone to talk with. Or I just left.
The difference between Facebook and the house party is that I could and did get drunk at the house party. That was the point of going to parties: to get drunk, to get laid, to get fed and to get away from home. Meeting people? Maybe a little, for a while, but the only people I really wanted to meet was a girl I hadn't met before and probably wasn't going to again. Later on, of course, I made a point of meeting Jack Daniels and Jim Beam and all those other guys.
Turns out I'm a career number-cruncher. There aren't many of us: most people who bash SQL and non-financial numbers aren't actually really any good at it, and don't really get the fun, and fall sideways into jobs that are about "project management" or "account management" or "engagement" or some other such soft stuff. Anyway, I fucked up my life and this is the only way I know how to make a living. So I work with people who are mostly between twenty-five and thirty-five, and I enjoy it. They keep me sharp and stop me getting complacent. I like them, and I'd like to think they like me, however odd they think I am, but we don't invite each other round to our places, go on holidays together or any of that stuff. If I was handed my P45, they would be upset for me, and not miss me by the same day the following week. I'm not being harsh here, but realistic.
They are, however, all the life I have, other than my family of origin and a couple of friends left from the Old Days. My only LTR finished about three years ago and there's been nothing since. I can remember the last time I had sex because it was the only time in the last seven years. Yes, you heard me. Seven years. That's what staying in an LTR that's lost its intimacy, but still seems to provide something, does for you. When I call my good looks "fading", I should probably say "vanished": my face is like a rubber death mask that can contort into a few stylised expressions. I look at it in the mirror when I shave, otherwise I don't want to see it. I have no idea why anyone would want to spend time with it. Are they all humouring the "old man"?
I'm fifty-eight next birthday. I have no money to pay for weekends and hotels, and nothing by way of a life to offer anyone. Sure I'd like some real sexTM, but at my age I have to bring a life or the things money can buy. There aren't many people "like me", I know that because I never saw another single guy my age in the restaurant lunchtime on the Cote des Basques reading Hegel's Aesthetics, or anything close: wherever I go, I don't see another me. Almost all men my age are either married, materially comfortable and living in smug denial, divorced and living in dingy flats making two sets of maintenance payments (one for the flat, one for the ex-wife), or they are weird cranks you wouldn't want in your life either. Non-married women my age? Either long-term single like me, and therefore as suspect as me, or looking for replacement fathers / husbands / first partners.
You think I'm talking myself into a corner here, but you don't see the world from where I stand. There's a lot of it, and it's all a long way away, just like it used to be, but now I know that since I can't get drunk at the house party, it really isn't worth me going. I never went to the kind of house parties where you might meet the co-writer or the hot girl or the guy who can introduce you to the guy who can back your venture. The house parties I went to were full of regular suburban kids like me.
I'm feeling down, and some of the descent is for good reasons. Right now, I look at the world and there's nowhere I want to be. The only place I've ever wanted to be is somewhere I don't have to come back from. Plenty of places I don't want to be, but nowhere I want to be. Not even here.
Oh. Facebook? I could ignore it, but that wouldn't change the actual facts of my life. I'm sure there's some creative way to use it - especially if I could stop all the junk coming to me account whenever I "like" anything.
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