A Statement of Intent (To Blog)

Loneliness is a peculiar but predictable (and often times familiar) feeling that tells us much about our placement in the world, what we do routinely and what we might very well expect from the near future. It is something we run from and run to, but that is always there with us, in some way.

There is a saying: “better to be alone than in bad company,” a phrase coined and utilized and then passed down mother to daughter like a family jewel or some tawdry mantelpiece (or even a 1965 Dodge Mustang Charger…if such a thing exists).

It’s risky to make broad, sweeping claims regarding this experience, even if doing so might yield something very insightful. Unlike what a recent local poet claimed, I assert (Kant would corroborate this) that we share many of our basic faculties for coming to and appreciating the world, the irony being that, when one says something and another raises their head in assent, that that they may still hold this conviction, for the form belies the content. Even then, minor disagreements often give way once further discussion is pursued, although spatial and temporal ‘distance’ and more discrete, particular differences in individual experience are nevertheless worth consideration.

This blog intends to discern some of the darker, more frustrating and endemic aspects of loneliness, but I will not approach it with any kind of scientistic lens. Descriptions of loneliness that involve chemical imbalance or some kind of physical internal interaction on the part of actor or the acted may well be useful. But use is determined by the end, no? For the rest of us who feel and live and wonder about the implications of these feelings, dopamine and serotonin are not friendly tools for self-interpretation. The scientific perspective, importantly also does not make good on its promise of giving us a final explanation (but merely extends and misleadingly delays others) and so I will not feature it here for that reason as well. I do not discount these perspectives outright or completely, but they are not my concern, and frankly, I feel them unnecessary for a better interpretation of our own selves, the kind that might make it easier to live us and our bodies on a daily basis.

Moreover this blog fixates on a particular experience of loneliness, rooted in a time and place. Theory requires place and time (whether or not it is stated). I speak specifically of a loneliness produced by a town that is not yet a city (and may likely never be). It is a place which holds a profoundly delusive and schizophrenic misinterpretation of itself and an unwillingness to admit to its own existential equivocation and uncertainty. Here, I speak of Modesto, California.

Meanwhile, in many places, it fails to purport to be anything resembling a community, more  a loosely-conglomerated series of residential areas and city-sanctioned mass-marketed commercial-institutional encroachments. This place is not without hope, but it might very well lose all direction if it doesn’t begin to reflect on itself and what it is not doing and what it could be doing better. Confronting such failure is not easy, but it is only in confrontation that overcoming is possible.