oh, lonesome me

Just like the old Don Gibson song. Right? More like the Neil Young version.

Whenever I feel like there’s just too much information in my brain, I go and stand on my head. Not only is it one helluva rush, it puts life in a whole new perspective. Still, it does nothing to change the fact that I’m all alone in this world.

Isolophobia is the fear of being alone. But I’m no Isolophobe. I might be alone, but I’m not afraid. I’m not an Autophobe or a Monophobe, either.

All I ever wanted was to be happy. But how can someone like me, with thoughts coming in and out of my mind like so many bugs crawling all over my skin, ever really expect to be happy?

Although I do not like leaving home, I’m certainly no shut-in. I go out sometimes. I have a job. I have to. How else would I survive?

It’s just that I prefer staying home when I can. With everything going on in the world today, can you blame me? And besides, why would I need to leave home when I have a perfectly fine peephole to see what’s going on around me?

I didn’t always stay home so much. I used to go out quite a bit. I went to UCLA, majored in microbiology, but while most of my friends went on to high-paying careers, I chose a different path. For some reason—I still don’t know exactly why—I came to the conclusion that there was more to life than just making money. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the first indication that my brain was turning on me.

I dropped out after only a few semesters. After that, I was just one of those losers hanging around pretending to still be going to school. Not even my friends knew.

No one cared. Not even my parents. As long as there was the threat of me moving back home, the checks kept coming.

Nowadays, whenever anyone asks me where I went to college, I tell them UCLA. If they ask what I graduated in, I tell them I majored in molecular biology. They just assume I graduated. It’s not a lie. It may not be the whole truth, but then again, who tells the whole truth?

Whenever someone asks me where I work, I tell them at the UCLA Medical Center. They just assume I’m a doctor. I suppose I could have been a doctor. I look like I could have been a doctor.

Truth is, I’m a bagman at the Infectious Disease Center over at UCLA. Before you go getting too impressed, however, you should know that “bagman” is just a fancy word for janitor. Actually, the Professor came up with it. The Professor is witty like that. He’s always coming up with one clever handle or another.

I’m a janitor, okay! Happy, now?

But hey, the good people over at the IDC know practically everything there is to know about germs. I should know; I clean up their mess every day.

And if you’re wondering how a guy like me with such an extensive knowledge of germs can work somewhere like that, it’s easy: What better place to know exactly what’s going down, and how to best prepare for it? Just like being in the eye of a hurricane, the IDC is the safest place there is when it comes to avoiding the coming storm of bugs, viruses, and cataclysmic pathogens.

It’s not a bad job. For someone who didn’t even graduate college, I make really good money. Or maybe it’s just that when it comes to handling hazardous materials, a good man is hard to find.

On top of that, I have job security like nobody’s business. Want to know how to get bulletproof job security? It’s not taking a job no one else WANTS to do, it’s taking a job no one else WILL do.

So what if I dropped out of UCLA? So did James Dean. Ben Stiller and James Franco, too. Jim Morrison only stayed in school long enough to avoid the draft. Even saying you’ve been to UCLA looks good on your resume, whether it’s true or not. Just ask David Geffen, who got his start with a fake diploma from UCLA. Today, the UCLA school of medicine is even named after him.

Does it matter to you that someone like me with such a big fat brain is just a janitor? Quite frankly, I don’t care if it does. My job doesn’t define who I am. It’s just an f’ing job. Anyway, chalkboard genius Matt Damon got his start as a janitor too. Don’t believe me? Just check out Good Will Hunting.

If you’re all caught up in what it is you do for a living, however, it doesn’t surprise me. Whether you know it or not, it’s an American thing, all dreamed up by big corporations to keep you in chains. If you thought slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, think again. Slavery is alive and well and working at America’s largest corporations every day; they just traded in the plantation homes for skyscrapers, bullwhips for morning conference calls.

Fact is, you’ve been brainwashed into thinking that who you are is defined by what you do for a living. Ridiculing the French, Italians, and others for their three-day workweeks and summers off is all just part of the indoctrination. Truth is, those countries already had their turn at obsessing over money and ruling the world. They found out it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, something I hope we here in America will discover someday as well—if we’re lucky. Me, I’ve always considered myself lucky.

But my job, as exciting as it sounds, is actually quite dull. There is no real human interaction. The only people I ever see are either hermetically sealed or all bound up in bubble wrap. So in reality, my life isn’t just boring, it’s lonely. So very lonely.

Did you know you can actually die from loneliness? It’s true. You can die from loneliness just like you can die from a broken heart. But a broken heart is something else, altogether. Dying from a broken heart means at least you had somebody, at some time. What I wouldn’t give to die from a broken heart.

According to the latest research, loneliness is a serious health risk, right up there with smoking. No joke. Studies even show that loneliness is twice as dangerous as obesity.

But even if loneliness doesn’t kill you, it can make you chronically ill. In fact, according to psychotherapist Dr. Nicky Forsythe, loneliness is the new germ. No joke. Just listen to what the good doctor has to say.

 

“Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psycho-biologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proven that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you.”

 

And she’s not the only one. According to UCLA’s very own Steve Cole, professor of biobehaviorial sciences, the immune system in lonely people breaks down over time and even affects the genes. That’s right. Nowadays, even people’s genes get lonely. Key gene sets, especially those involved with antiviral responses and antibody production, they get lonely too.

Wow! I mean, sure, I thought being lonely was a real drag, but I had no idea it was clinical.

But things are not all doom and gloom. It’s not like my life is an infinite downward spiral of emptiness. I have TV. I have my stories. And not those endless, mind-numbing streams of reality shows: horny housewives, cheating husbands, lying fiancés, bigshot bachelors. No, I’m talking about classic TV: golden-oldie stuff like the Dick Van Dyke Show. Gomer Pyle. Green Acres, too.

I grew up on old reruns of Star Trek and Speed Racer. UltraMan, too. Wow. I’d forgotten all about UltraMan.

I used to skip school all the time when I was young. I’d stay home and watch TV all day. Our house was so big, I sometimes wondered if my parents even knew I was still alive.

My room was out behind the garage and the only person who ever came through was our maid, Maria, on her way to the deep freezer.

When I’d hear the door open, I’d slip under the covers until she passed through. Maria was instructed never to clean my room, so there was always a mountain of dirty clothes piled high on my bed. The perfect hiding place.

Funny thing was, she would always turn the TV off on her way back. Every time. And every time she came back through, the TV was on again. I used to think Maria was oblivious, but now I’m more inclined to believe she knew exactly what was going on. She understood English just fine, even though my parents were convinced she couldn’t speak a word. Maria and I had an unspoken bond. As second-class citizens in the Schmeck household, we always had each other’s’ backs.

I was raised by Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch, clean-cut shows with family values. I used to dream about having a big family like the Brady’s. Lots of brothers and sisters. A mom like Carol and a dad like Mike. It wouldn’t be until years later I’d find out that father-of-the-year Mike Brady was all this time playing for the pink team, and that his heir apparent, Johnny Bravo, was schtupping his wife back behind the washing machine. Good ole TV.

And of course, Bonanza. But we’ll get to that soon enough.

TV was my whole world. How sad.

I wonder what John Steinbeck knew when he said, “A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ.” I think the only thing Steinbeck knew was that finishing-off one bottle of booze didn’t necessarily make you an alcoholic, opening the next one did. Wait. That was Hemingway. Same difference.

All this talk of loneliness was getting me depressed, and the last thing a lonely person living on the ninth floor needs to be is depressed. The last thing a lonely person living on the ninth floor needs to be doing is thinking about Ernest Hemingway, either.

Even worse, the last thing someone living on the ninth floor needs to be thinking about is whether he can actually fly or not. I have dreams about flying all the time, you know. In my dreams, I fly all over the place. I fly over mountains. I fly over oceans. I even fly over the Grand Canyon. My dreams seem so real, I try and stay in them as long as possible. But unfortunately, they are just dreams. Or are they?

Maybe I can fly. Maybe I could jump right out this ninth-floor window and soar on down past the beach all the way to the Santa Monica Pier. Perhaps even farther. Maybe all the way to Catalina. San Francisco. The Aleutians.

Or maybe I’m just bipolar. It’s a distinct possibility. Seems I’m either raging against the machine, or down-and-out depressed. Maybe that’s what passes for normal these days.

So the world is coming to an end. So what? The awful truth is, it’s already there.

Oh, what the hell, I thought. What did I have to lose? I wasn’t made for this world of raging chefs and pimple poppers anyway. Really? Pimple poppers?

I had seen every rerun of I Love Lucy already. The Andy Griffith Show, Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island too. They were never going to make shows like that again.

There was never going to be another cliffhanger like Who Shot J.R. M*A*S*H was never coming back, and even Alex Trebek was dead and gone.

Just thinking about all this was enough to push me over the edge. But let’s be clear: I was NOT thinking about committing suicide. No sir. My plan was to get out of here. Alive! Somewhere deep down inside, I really did think: Maybe I could fly. Greatest American Hero? Ever heard of it? Anyway, if it was good enough for Evel Knievel, it was good enough for me. Too much TV? Perhaps.

I backed it on up and was just about to get a running start—see if I really could fly—when all of a sudden, out my peephole, there she was. Like an angel sent from heaven: my new neighbor from across the hall.