Friends-Giving

With Thanksgiving now past we move into the core of the holiday season which actually concludes at Valentines Day in February. So for the next 10 weeks expect some sort of display, advertisement or article on how to stay sane/keep fit/find gifts and of course travel and do so despite rising costs of both travel and entertainment. Wow that sounds so fun!

I also will read numerous articles on loneliness and of course the rise in social isolation that has maintained since the onset of Covid in late 2019, when we thought it was just a simple virus and to be cautionary. Remember those holidays? No me either. I was still traveling between Nashville and Jersey and saw many travelers wearing masks as they were coming from Asia. I had been reading about the virus and knew instantly this was not something that will pass, little did I know how bad it would be. And then by the New Year it turned quickly to shit. Remember those fun pressers with Trump and the counterpoint Andrew Cuomo who would use their pulpit to bully and to coerce others into compliance and cooperation or sheer ignorance and little respect for others let alone their own health? Yeah and the rise of Fauci who retires next month and to never see him again either is fine with me. All three of these Stooges did little to assuage or comfort Americans with their endless polticizing, conflicting and contradicting messaging and of course the sheer bullshit that came out all of it from both sides of the political aisle. Not the first time I have seen a transmissible disease used as a political football, but hopefully the last. Nah, we had Monkeypox and that seems to have faded but that is fine as vaccines for diseases that are totally preventable are on the decline. Enjoy those pox/measles and the like at your holiday buffet and then when you have illnesses later thanks to the post affects of them, you can thank yourself and your family for their ignorance and lack of access to proper medical care. Folks few people have family Doctors and rely on Urgent Care and ER’s for their primary care which by then is now past the preventative stage. America, bringing back epidemics one at a time.

So with that we enter the phase of the moon where after three years of paranoia and hysteria we are to gather together and put all that aside to share a plate of food that may or may not cost more, taste any better or be worth all that time or travel to sit at a table and talk about what? Sports? TV? Movies? Books? Oh wait no one reads books they read Social Media that tells them about books. So they talk about I guess Book reports that they saw/heard on Tik Tok.

I go to a great deal of events of which I write about here, largely because this is self published and with that it is still considered published work and for that I can get some tax credits for the cost of doing so. I struggle keeping up the blog and was beginning another to draft fiction and see how to create work from what is ostensibly non fiction and turn it into fiction to avoid the whole concept of what is “creative non fiction” versus actual non fiction. Meaning that I can change names, situations and blur truth with well lies or made up shit isn’t that fiction, created non truths? Sometimes writing linear stories are boring and why most non fiction is not well read or sold other than a few bios that draw the eye and then the Author disappears back into the world to never have that kind of success again. The late Author, Julie Powell of Julia and Julie is a good example. She never had that kind of recognition and acclaim that began as what? A blog. From that drew attention and success which it evolved into a book and movie that was never replicated again in her brief time on earth. Or how about James Frey who wrote a creative non fiction book that was so beloved by Oprah, then it was discovered it was just that – creative fiction. His life ended in a similar fashion, once infamous now just sorta famous, a cultural footnote.

And that is the struggle for many who despite having had fame, fortune and success is finding a path that maintains this course of life and that the creative fuel or inspiration maintains. It ain’t easy. I can do small doses of inspired thought and then like any drug, it lasts for a moment and then back to real life. I get why people do drugs as they cannot handle the let down, the sense of high and with that the power it brings that makes one feel unique, special, loved. Read Modern Love in the New York Times or LA Affairs in the LA Times. These are the stories of the heart and head that talk about the success and failures of finding love and romance in the big city. I find them incredibly amusing, boring, sanctimonious, sad, or interesting. I don’t read them all the time but I do occasionally pass over them. I read one today, “When love calls, go.” My first thought, “Hang up the phone or don’t answer.” Honestly I did not get one word of that as it was a cultural story that one would have to understand the history behind the concept of race, identity, religion and belief in the institution and dogmas that are embedded into the belief of arranged marriage and its import to one’s family and history. But it continued to reinforce my belief that religion is the bane of all existence, especially to Women. Had that woman stayed in Hong Kong, had a thriving career, remained with her family and met someone on her own or not, what could have happened could have been equally if not more satisfying or joyous than meeting a dude and marrying him and moving across the globe to satisfy what appeared to be her family’s wishes, not her own. Wow. Just wow.

And in that same paper they had a story about a Breakup Bootcamp. It charges 4K to mend a broken heart. I knew in my heart I had potential to be a cult leader as I watch the Vow Season 2 on HBO and yet I also could not go through the charades and machinations to maintain such bullshit and duplicity. I mean once I cleared that first million I would be out of there and claiming that we must end this and go on our own journey to seek knowledge and freedom. Then I would immediately move to Switzerland.

I am not going to comment on any of that absurd bootcamp but it is about the same cost for some visits to Therapist over a brief period and add Yoga, a Sex Worker and a short vacation, it adds up so this is fine frankly if that is what you need to feel better. I am sure the ESP/NXIVM folks felt the same after their thousands of dollars dropped for bullshit jargon and coaching from ostensibly two white people that look like Middle School Teachers. Wow. Just wow.

But it is this pervasive FEAR of being alone. This has fueled many of the shooters who have no social ties and cite a lack of a “girlfriend” as their reasoning. The most current crop that shot up a Bus, a Walmart and a Gay Bar seem to have the most diverse reasoning or lack thereof as to why as one committed suicide (the Walmart employee) and the others “motives” at this point will either evolve or never fully be understood as again it is less about the why but more about the how. How they get a gun and ammo and feel compelled to act upon their rage in a manner that kills and harms people just living their lives is the only thing I care about. This is not about mental health as you are already crazy to start amassing guns, get tactical gear and ammo to then act on your rage. Yes, you are crazy. The end literally and towards people who had nothing to do with your rage or anger. The exception it appears is the Walmart crazy who while working their expressed paranoia, delusions and rage yet not one co-worker or supervisor felt compelled to listen to him and inform those around him that this is a problem. And that may explain his list and targets. We truly do not actively listen, we patronize, ignore or simply are that self involved to not. Almost all shooters have expressed similar anger prior to their acts and yet again and again we go “mental health” but hey its clear we have no fucking clue what defines mentally healthy.

And again we have this insatiable belief or idea that you must be partnered off, have a hand count of life long friends whom you rely to be that family of another kind. Great my family were nuts so would this be a sane family and what is sane. While I found my Parents challenging as parents they were not bad people so being their friend is not an issue and with that I accept their limitations and have moved on the therapy stage of blaming them for all my ills. What I did learn was independence and the ability to rely on myself which can be overwhelming and at times I would appreciate someone else to do the heavy lifting. I would actually really love someone to plan something and include me in a genuine offer of friendship. This would be inviting me to a play, a movie, a walk. An ACTUAL invite with the exchange being that they do the planning/organizing or get the tickets and I will pick up a meal, drink or something in the future in which to reciprocate. I can truly say that will never happen. The last time I was invited to something was in Nashville to a baseball game that I did not want to go but felt I could not say no as to not hurt their feelings and I dressed and was ready with a no show text about 20 minutes before. I knew it was a lie and was furious and it was then I decided to lie and fuck with that individuals head from that point on. But is that mentally healthy? No, but I found it by far more entertaining and when I left I finally did admit that I made it all up I could in fact write fiction! I was by far more creative when I put my mind to it but it also changed how I saw people and the limitations I could foresee as I moved forward in life. And that led to the policy of No Compromise. Since landing in Jersey City I have had two social encounters with two different Artists, one I went to Governor’s Island with (which turned out to be the longest and best thing of that) and another who I met for coffee and she drank none and we walked around Union Square for about an hour. It was boring and neither of them I have seen again nor even remember their names. But again effort made, it was stalled and I moved on. No harm no foul and no compromise.

And this weekend I read the below article in the Washington Post from of all things an Economist who is concerned about the concept of Social Isolation. What resulted was not a far reaching discussion on health, loneliness and the overall affects it can pose on mental or physical well being. This was about the issue of choice and of situation. Yes the rise of mental health issues and the like that can be serious when we speak of those who are alone, and wish to be otherwise. That is completely different when one chooses be alone and or is simply alone, and yes folks I was in a marriage of one so you can be in partnerships that are of that nature. I refer to my Parents who again were the role model of that which I duplicated to a tee, so yes I do now know that boundaries and interests and relationships do not need co-dependency in which to thrive. And yes folks that my Parents did not do things together, sleep together, socialize or have interests together they were utterly co-dependent on that dysfunction that I thought that was “normal” or “healthy” and today I find myself content with the idea that yes that works for me now. Irony I am back to where I started only now I can articulate that and am sure I do not want a partner to live with me or fuck me. I just want a great friend whom I can do things upon occasion and have trust and respect as the foundation of such. That will never be a Woman they are incapable of it. We women are an unhappy lot and I just look to the Karen who lives in 946 below me and that performance in my Apt. on October 10. Then last week to get on the elevator with me and act as if she had no clue who I was confirmed it, she is what? Crazy. Just not gunshot crazy. And that is what falls under the umbrella of a mental health disorder.

And when I read the article and the comments that followed they too confirmed the reality is that most people choose to be alone, they are bored, frustrated, exhausted. Some come to it from years of having to care take and be the primary care giver, have had tremendous loss and want to be alone and some manage to have a healthy relationship with their partner/family and feel no great urge to be the life of the party. I am a great advocate of the “random” where your path crosses for an hour or two and take great pleasure in that exchange and then move on. I finally accepted that and often do make an offer of a future time but I don’t mean it and I really do. That is being polite. Most often I don’t remember their names and make sure that I am appreciative and thankful but I am done with it. The nice man I met with his friend (and yes I do recall both their names they were delighful and deserve that respect) on my Birthday whom I had dinner I die offer to reciprocate. My first attempt was in that same week to meet by coming into the city and running errand and saying I was stopping for coffee so if he was around to let me know and left it there. His response, “I don’t drink coffee.” So I told him to have a nice day and keep in touch. He did and with that I have been deeply bored with the texting and after my disaster at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the German Actor in Hamlet I realized I was truly done with plays and theater. I had my few tickets left and was going but not going to discuss or pursue any further drama, literally or figuratively. So this weekend I planned a trip to Baltimore in January to see the John Waters exhibit and attend their acclaimed Symphony. As I planned it I recalled that the Gentleman was coming to see Death of a Salesman again (where we all met) on the 13th but I simply dismissed it then moved on with my plans. And sure enough the very next day I got a text with all the tickets and theater he was planning on attending that weekend. It was packed and unless I attended one of them on the same day and time I could not possibly reciprocate with dinner. I was secretly relieved. But with that I responded. “Wow great choices, shame I don’t do Broadway anymore and with that schedule I doubt we would have a chance to get together anyway. Enjoy”. His response was Happy Thanksgiving anyway. Loved the deep inquiry into “What you don’t do Broadway anymore?” Yeah, like coffee. Again the lack of curiosity and interest said more than had he expressed as such. Even if I wasn’t going to Baltimore that weekend I am back Sunday morning, but with a short window and his lack of coffee I am not sure what he thought we could do. Have Breakfast? I actually don’t do breakfast. So with that I suspect it is done. I am relieved as we had nothing to talk about but the play. There is only so much to talk about there. I am not sure he thought we were to be anything more than friendly acquaintances but the inability to communicate and speak about things other than a single subject be that theater, politics or sports is a problem folks.

I find it fascinating that people find me so “intelligent” which is great but it is really that I simply read, retain and seek knowledge and experiences. It takes so little effort to find things to do that I like. I went to see the play, Piano Lesson, with a very star studded cast on Tuesday. I have been a fan of August Wilson as despite all his plays taking place in Baltimore where he once lived, he lived his later years in Seattle and it was from there is how I became familiar with his work and life. He lived a short distance from me in Mt. Baker and sadly our paths never crossed but I am sure he would have been a lively conversationalist. And with that I decided to stay in the City for the night as to avoid another drama at my home And at what had to be the best find of hotels in Manhattan, Public, in the LES. I have fond memories of that hood, often staying there when I would visit. It is still a mixed but thriving area and with that easy access to and from Midtown and the PATH exchanges. I had the best time at Public, from a room upgrade to a bottle of Prosecco on the house, I can not say enough good things about the service or the hotel. It is a must go to stay or just to dine, drink or visit. I am going to have to find another excuse in the future to stay despite my disinclination to attend Broadway in the future. Yes that much was true as there is nothing next season I plan on seeing unless I buy day of or lottery. It is not worth it. Two more to go with an Off Broadway show, Man of No Importance and the Musical 1776, my calendar is now full of Opera and some Cabaret. But theater is no longer my muse and with that we will always have our moments but it must be exceptional in every sense of the word.

And you do atttend Cabaret you can reserve a table or sit at a bar seat and with that I will never sit anywhere but a bar seat. I am seeing Sandra Bernhardt next month and Joe’s Pub to end the year and wisely will take the bar. I did Below 54 last week as well and they “upgraded” me to a table. I shared with a Mother, and a Daughter and another young woman who also joined the table. I knew after I was cut off mid sentence I had nothing more to say so I listened to their conversation progress and the best part was the Young Woman was originally from Nashville, confirming that I needed to keep my mouth firmly on my wine as flashbacks and reminisces were not on the menu. So I listened to the table next to me discuss their theater going and thanks to that convo again reminding me why it was time to forego it as they defined the “type” of NYC theater audience. Their discussion defined pretentious but while they trashed one production the irony was that next to them at another table was the Stage Manager of said production. Ah NYC folks it is a small town. I have come to the conclusion that yes I am smart and smart enough that small talk is being polite but silence is golden, like the Tony Awards.

So why are people alone? Read Bowling Alone a 20 year old book by Robert Putnam. It explains it and shows that little has changed but the methods in which we did connect and socialize have eroded and with it today’s Social Media is anything but a manner in which to meet and find others just like you. We are all now algorithms, and as in math, like finds like to solve the equation. Math is Hindu-Arabic, its own language and you read it right to left and we are Americans who suck at math. That may be why as we are also not bi-lingual and we assume that all of the rest will come to do as we do, as we do it. Yeah okay.

So embrace aloneness, do not confuse it with loneliness. If one suffers the one prospers and you must find the ways to those tiny relationships that can boost self esteem and self worth. My stay at the Public Hotel did that. With that I found out 946 was gone for the week, but I am glad I did stay regardless; I needed to treat myself to civility and dignity. And that is how you meet others in that orbit of positive energy that enables me to thrive and survive. I have let the thoughts of suicide pass over me and that is all they do – pass.

I spent Thanksgiving watching old movies. First was Blackboard Jungle (which irony had Sidney Pointier as the bad student which only decade later he would be taking on the redeeming Teacher role and my influencer in To Sir With Love) and folks there may be more closeness to reality than I imagined when I read this about a former Teacher at one of the many schools I subbed at in Nashville – Johnson. This was,the last stop before Jail and I knew this Teacher but the story was right out of the movie. That school had many problems, including that at one point Nashville Police quit as they did not feel safe there. Yeah no one did, it was literally a block away much like the other school in Jersey City Bright St which was, until this year and it explains why I subbed there as well, but not one moment did I feel safe. There was no learning, no security and frankly no point. So after that flashback, I then watched the original Boys in the Band from 1970; a film about a Birthday party but in reality a gay night of anger, rage and recrimination by a bunch of Queer friends who define the word in a dysfunctional way, not a fun “gay” way. Toxic friendships are just that toxic and with that it shows that even Men straight or gay have anger issues. Yikes, how perfect for the holidays to remind yourself maybe being alone is not that bad of an idea.

Opinion Americans are choosing to be alone. Here’s why we should reverse that.

By Bryce Ward

November 23, 2022. The Washington Post

Bryce Ward is an economist and the founder of ABMJ Consulting.

The covid-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our social lives. Cancellations, closures and fear of a potentially deadly infection led us to hunker down and avoid acquaintances, co-workers and extended family. Time spent with friends went down. Time spent alone went up.

Thanksgiving was not spared. Americans spent 38 percent less time with friends and extended family over the Thanksgiving weekend in the past two years than they had a decade prior.

And now for the scarier news: Our social lives were withering dramatically before covid-19. Between 2014 and 2019, time spent with friends went down (and time spent alone went up) by more than it did during the pandemic.

According to the Census Bureau’s American Time Use Survey, the amount of time the averageAmerican spent with friends was stable, at 6½ hours per week, between 2010 and 2013. Then, in 2014, time spent with friends began to decline.

By 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends (a sharp, 37 percent decline from five years before). Social media, political polarization and new technologies all played a role in the drop. (It is notable that market penetration for smartphones crossed 50 percent in 2014.)

Covid then deepened this trend. During the pandemic, time with friends fell further — in 2021, the average American spent only two hours and 45 minutes a week with close friends (a 58 percent decline relative to 2010-2013).

Similar declines can be seen even when the definition of “friends” is expanded to include neighbors, co-workers and clients. The average American spent 15 hours per week with this broader group of friends a decade ago, 12 hours per week in 2019 and only 10 hours a week in 2021.

On average, Americans did not transfer that lost time to spouses, partners or children. Instead, they chose to be alone.

No single group drives this trend. Men and women, White and non-White, rich and poor, urban and rural, married and unmarried, parents and non-parents all saw proportionally similar declines in time spent with others. The pattern holds for both remote and in-person workers.

The percentage decline is also similar for the young and old; however, given how much time young people spend with friends, the absolute decline among Americans age 15 to 19 is staggering. Relative to 2010-2013, the average American teenager spent approximately 11 fewer hours with friends each week in 2021 (a 64 percent decline) and 12 additional hours alone (a 48 percent increase).

These new habits are startling— and a striking departure from the past.Just a decade ago, the average American spent roughly the same amount of time with friends as Americans in the 1960s or 1970s. But we have now begun to cast off our connections to each other.

It is too soon to know the long-term consequences of this shift, but it seems safe to assume that the decline of our social lives is a worrisome development. Spending less time with friends is not a best practice by most standards, and it might contribute to other troubling social trends — isolation, worsening mental health (particularly among adolescents), rising aggressive behavior and violent crime. Americans rate activities as more meaningful and joyful when friends are present. Friends and social connections build on themselves and produce memories and fellowship. They also boost health and lead to better economic outcomes.

We can hope, as covid-related barriers recede, that people will change course.Time with friends did increase in 2021 after the vaccine rolled out; however, at the end of 2021, it was still an hour below the 2019 level. Furthermore, a Pew Research Center survey made public in August suggests that covid might have changed us permanently — 35 percent of Americans say that participating in large gatherings, going out and socializing in-person have become less important since the pandemic.

The potential harms of these trends are sufficient to demand that Americans devote some resources to understanding and reversing them.

You can help reverse these trends today without waiting for the researchers and policymakers to figure it all out. It’s the holidays: Don’t skip Thanksgiving with your family. Go to that holiday party (or throw one yourself). Go hang out with friends for coffee, or a hike, or in a museum, or a concert — whatever. You will feel better, create memories, boost your health, stumble across valuable information — and so will your companions.

Put effort into building relationships that you can count on in good times and bad because, as the song goes, that’s what friends are for. Besides, you just might have a good time.

The Sound Inside

For the hundreds of millions now in lockdown or about to be what that experience will be like will be exactly the same number who are/were in lockdown. In other words: Different like everyone else.

The article below discusses how varying individuals across the globe are finding this distancing working out for them and the time it has enabled them to connect to their world beyond their door but also within their walls.

If there is one thing I have learned that we are a culture that is very afraid to be alone. It varies with age, gender, culture, religion and and race.  We have seen many faces of color the most affected by this virus and largely due to very condensed living spaces. When you have multi generational families living in small urban and dense environments you have a breeding ground of disease. Everyone is coming in and out each with their own contacts and in turn they touch each surface, meals are shared, facilities are limited for hygiene and the constant ebb and flow of those on varying schedules makes it challenging at best to establish a routine that in turn facilitates a spread of a virus.

Poverty is of course one aspect and the other is wealth.  Successful wealthy people travel, they come into contact with a multitude of associates, they are social and have many others who serve their needs and accommodate their schedules. They are often invisible and in turn come into close contact with the families and their belongings/lodgings and possessions.  They are contact surfaces and in turn they are also responsible for their households including children who go to parks, schools and other places where they in turn contact numerous individuals and surfaces that are all transmission for disease.

In other words we all come into contact with viruses and disease every day.  It is called being human, its what we do.  Unless you are a Hermit or are in some type of religious group or cult that socially isolates and well physically does as well you are not going to avoid any of this in some form or another. It could have been the cold you had earlier last year or the flu or some other ailment that knocked you out for a few days. Was it Covid? Does it matter if you are up and around and healthy now?  Were any of your friends, family, business associates knocked out by it shortly after or before you encountered them?  How many times do you inquire about someone’s health in more than a general “How are you?” manner?   You don’t and even if you you may listen but not hear them as few want to discuss their personal ailments.   Funny how we will disclose anything and everything on social media but during a pandemic we are as silent as a church mouse.

I grew up an only child so I was left to my own amusement most as I don’t even recall children in my neighborhood other than the poor family behind my home who had children of special needs and varying ailments that set my family off as I recall ringworm once that to my Mother was equivalent of Covid.  So I was a loner early on and paranoid of disease apparently as I am actually a health freak about that and had a Father who could teach the CDC cleaning protocol.  So being lonely was not something I needed to fix, I could go to the local drug store and sit at the counter and chat with the lady who worked there and have a Coke.  I went to the Library all the time and the Librarians knew me well as did most of our local vendors.  The nearby Francine Seders gallery was one of my favorite places to spend time, I thought for the longest time it was a Museum.  And of course I walked Green Lake all the time and took joy in just that.

I noticed this social distancing more as a teenager and then sometime during my teen years I had enough.  I went to College and had the normal boyfriends, roommates and the like and hated every minute of it.  Went back home, transferred and lived at home until age 30.  Then I had to grow up and find a life.  And attempts at conventional life was tried and ultimately rejected. I sampled some of it in Nashville and again proven that people are assholes regardless of age, race, gender, of belief or politics. What those do is make it easier to label and in turn disregard or regard with whatever you feel is important to you.

We largely identify ourselves through our work or professional identity.  It is why we have decided to add to the list of Heroes, Doctors, Grocery Clerks, Amazon workers, Bus Drivers to the list of Front Liners or First responders in the hierarchy of import.  Funny those are often the lowest paid on the rung of the ladder of import, well other than Doctors and frankly that is bullshit, but we revere Athletes, Celebrities and CEO’s because why. They make money.  We all want to be rich and we cannot and the rich have made sure of that but that I have written about extensively. What we have seen during this pandemic the rejection of celebrity and their strange Instagrams and other futile attempts to prove they are in this together with us from their mansions and homes that are still be attended to by the invisible work force to mind their homes, their children and their professional finances.   They will be fine.  I did see hysteria over the NFL draft but then again football people are not my people so guess what. I.don’t.give.a.flying.fuck.

I keep hearing about these random acts of kindness and wonder where they are?  I have neither seen nor experienced them. I recall the Yoga Teacher in March saying, “I am your friend, I care” after demeaning me for talking about the VIRUS..well I was ahead of that curve…pun intended. Has she ever reached out to email or call me? No but they have on demand Yoga and since I paid already for a membership it’s perfect contactless delivery.  In my building I watched the panic hoarding and hysteria and then that curve leveled off and guess what? It’s back as I predicted hysteria by May 31 and its coming. Staff have quit which in this job market is a bad idea and unless he plans on going to work at an Amazon warehouse.   I am not sure what he is qualified for and he quit over Covid fear so that is the last place I would work. And because he quit no he does not get unemployment so there you go another millennial idiot.

As for that unemployment benefit that extends extra funds, that ends in July and that is when the lift on the lockdown will occur and that is not a coincidence as there are none.  I actually read the Executive Orders of the idiot Governor of NJ and in there was the date June 1.  So when he came out with his plan which was well no plan so okay then I already knew that there is no Memorial Day BBQ on the schedule.  And as the South opens up with its immense poverty and lack of health care for the poor watch Wave 2 hit there and here in the North with our liberal smugness it will be “I told you so.”  So good luck there Georgia! But if not, thanks for being the lab rat and seeing if it works, we are not as stupid as you, so you first! Either/Or Neither/Nor we get it we really do.

And as I read all about the fears, the frustrations and the anger about having to live in social isolation and in turn try to find ways to feed the head, the heart and the stomach as well food shortages and all (again not happening we have a logistics issue that is the problem) we are not thriving or even demonstrating rational behavior.  And this is where we are, nowhere.  And we are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Isaiah 26:20
Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut your doors behind you. Hide yourselves a little while until the wrath has passed.

What does a pandemic sound like? For many of us at home, it’s a heartbreaking silence.

The Washington Post
By Robin Givhan
April 28, 2020

In India, the incessant beep-beep of cars has disappeared. In New York, Harlem’s heart has stopped beating. In the suburbs of Detroit, the chatter of neighbors is muffled. In Toronto, the trains no longer whistle, and in Marseille, every day sounds like a holiday. All around the world, the silence rolls in and out like fog. It hangs in the air — there but not there. Impenetrable and fragile, weightless and smothering.

It’s periodically disrupted — by the shriek of an ambulance siren, the rattle of a construction truck or the evening applause for first responders. For those lucky enough to work from their home, FaceTime and Zoom keep the afternoon buzzing with a new familiarity. But eventually, the silence comes.

We are deep in the horror and kicking our way to the surface. What does a pandemic sound like? Emptiness.

In March, Faith Heyison was in the thick of her professional duties — working with fashion designers behind the scenes in their showrooms and on their runway productions. Heyison was in her glory: the chaotic, exhausting whirl of creativity on a global scale. Her work regularly takes her to New York and Paris, and by the time she returns to Monsempron-Libos, the small town in southwestern France where she lives, she usually welcomes the peace and quiet that greet her.

But now the silence is not so much a well-earned gift as a voracious monster that has snuffed out the reassuring rumble and roar of daily life.

The Bible says, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” But sometimes in this age of covid-19, it seems that the sweet cacophony in our dreams is what soothes us, not the silence of our waking hours.

“I live alone. I am not permitted to visit neighbors or friends. I am not permitted to be somewhere other than my primary residence. I cannot take one of the few available trains to a coastal town. Everything would be closed anyway, including hotels. I cannot escape by means of an airplane to another country,” Heyison says in an email. “Even if I could, all I would find would be more silence.”

“Sleep is actually a welcome respite because in my dreams, it’s noisy,” she says. “I talk to people I know. I talk to people I never met. I am in places I know. I am in places I have never been. Sleep is the easy part. It’s waking up that is harder.”

Just past midnight, as Saturday blurs into Sunday, a walk sign on H Street NE in the nation’s capital glows white but there are no footfalls. The only sound on the empty sidewalk is the electronic bloop, bloop, bloop of the traffic signal counting down the seconds before . . . no one moves and the hush only deepens. No cars rumble through the intersection. The city’s inglorious streetcar, on its newly shortened schedule, stopped running hours ago and so there’s no impudent clanging of its horn, no squeal of its metal wheels on its track.

The late-night urban soundscape has become little more than digital chirps and the occasional guttural outburst from the lost soul wrapped in a vagabond’s blanket.

By Sunday’s light, H Street is free of the usual detritus that comes from the crowds of bar-hoppers, late-night diners and music lovers. Silence is litter-free.

Some people find the quiet calming. They feel closer to God. They give in to the stillness and consider their destiny. They have a silver-lining attitude: The air is cleaner; crimes rates have dropped; school shootings ceased in the United States. If you tilt your head and squint, the quieting of the world can be seen as a gift.

But when we, the agitated, try to breathe deeply and locate our spiritual center, it’s elusive.

“I keep thinking, ‘This is great, I’ll just sit here and simply be.’ But then my mind freaks out and it starts racing and then I’m like ‘Ahh, must make some noise,’” says Sara Ngwenya, who lives in Nottingham, England. “There’s too much reality that’s hidden in those pockets of silence, and I’m not sure I can handle it at the moment.”

The silence isn’t a respite; it’s relentless. It’s no longer the absence of sound; it is the sound.

“I’m kind of an introvert; I need to retreat,” says LaTasha Simmons, a nail technician who worked in Brooklyn — back when there was noise — and lives on Long Island. “This is forced silence instead of silence that you’re creating for yourself.” Instead of looking to it as a tonic to recharge from a hectic day, there’s no hurly-burly from which to withdraw. We don’t wind down because we never wound up.

What we lose when a great American city has no nightlife

What day is it? Sound is an aural calendar: the whoosh of weekday rush-hour traffic, the hoots of the Friday night bar brigade, the slam of shared bicycles into their electronic docks on a Saturday afternoon full of errands.

“Since the lockdown began, every day feels like a Sunday. You wake up, and you hear . . . nothing,” says Nicolas Icard, a 23-year-old communications student in isolation with his parents in Marseille, France. “I think people are divided between the calm that they might be experiencing in their lives and the fear of what will happen next.”

Instead of silence being part of the natural rhythm of life, life has flatlined. And the thought of resuscitating our beloved with a jolt is terrifying. In Florida and Georgia, the chattering crowds on beaches, the buzz of barbershop clippers, the zap-zap of tattoo needles aren’t noises of life; they’re a tolling of the bells.

The silence really can be deafening. When a normally high-volume city is abruptly put on mute, our brain is hypersensitive to the shift. What we’ve experienced is akin to leaving a loud concert and stepping into the hush of the night. The silence registers intensely. It’s almost suffocating.

“It definitely leaves you alone in your head,” Simmons says. And for many of us, our head is filled with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. “I need a little bit of noise to drown out the silence.”

The quiet shouldn’t be confused with loneliness, which is a mental state. And it’s not synonymous with solitude, although there are points of overlap, like in a Venn diagram, says Thuy-vy Nguyen, an assistant professor at Durham University who researches solitude and resiliency.

Solitude — or alone time — can be filled with moments of silence, but it can also be rich with music. And anyone who’s ever had an argument with a roommate knows it’s possible to have silence — or to get the silent treatment — when solitude would be much preferred.

Still, one wonders whether the discomfort with silence is exacerbated by solitude. Or can silence cause loneliness? Perhaps the brewing uneasiness is just the desire to hear someone say: You are loved. You are valued.

Nguyen began researching solitude long before the pandemic. She was especially focused on how older people respond to it. She and her colleagues were hampered by the amount of enforced alone time a subject could ethically be asked to endure. The pandemic has removed that hurdle.

Nguyen has learned that as long as subjects know that they have value to someone beyond their four walls, even if they didn’t have the ability to connect with that person, they could stave off loneliness.

Silence can be remedied with the click of a remote control. Throw open the home office doors and let in the whirling-dervish of a toddler. But this silence is unlike any other. It can’t be filled by bingeing on television or audiobooks. It requires the complicated, sweeping, unmatched symphony of life.

“I live in the suburbs, but there’s always things going on. And now, if you go outside, you’re barely seeing any cars. You see people walking and they all cross the street to move away from you. No one is speaking,” say Andi Rehm, a fashion stylist at Tender boutique in Birmingham, Mich.

The silence isn’t merely the absence of noise. It’s the fear of interaction. It’s judgment, longing and paranoia. It’s our distressed human condition amplified. When the sounds of nature — the birds chirping, the rustling leaves — become the soundtrack of a formerly vibrant, agitating city, at first you’re lulled into calm, says Karishma Sehgal, who blogs about sustainability and upcycling, from her home in Pune, in western India. Then you remember that life has turned inside out.

“Spring is in full gear, but there aren’t human sounds to chime in,” says Leah Rossi, a Toronto-based fashion stylist.

The volume of the natural world has been cranked up. Maybe it’s a greater power — the good Lord, Mother Nature, karma, the Fates — giving notice that humans are not in control of their environment; they must work in concert with it.
A woman walks outside of Kingman Park in Washington.
A woman walks outside of Kingman Park in Washington. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/for The Washington Post)

We troop through the streets on our essential errands. The sun might be shining and the sky may be blue but it sounds like a storm is coming. We hear the same heaviness in the air that precedes a tornado. We wait and watch for a thunderous funnel cloud that for most of us — blessedly healthy at home and without loved ones in hospitals — never comes.
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“I took a walk this very morning,” says Daniel Lanzilotta, an artist in Harlem. The silence “is thick. It’s a sadness. I started crying under my mask.

“I went back home.”

Divided We Fall

The Virus does not know class, race, gender, age, ethnicity or any extraneous factors that make you special.  It does however give a clear distinction when access and availability to escape from quarantine, curfew, large mass populations and potential zones of infection.   Living in a small apartment with multiple family members makes it tight in the best of circumstances in the worst, impossible. There is where the rich have the distinction to live in larger spaces, have second even third homes to escape to and of course private planes and other modes of transportation that lessen potential infected contacts.  But that is a small circle in which to travel and we have seen some famous and others who run in that crowd survive and others not as again the virus takes no prisoners.

This is one example of how the rich are distinctly different and this is another how the poor try to stay alive when all the rugs, nets and floors beneath them have fallen and the roof over their head is next.   And of course the shops and stores where the elite greet and meet and the aspirant class desire to own have literally shuttered their stores in fear of the great unrest which will occur but I am not sure we are storming the gates of Versailles and taking the Vuitton.

When I read this story I understood it in ways that few do.  I live alone, however, have no extended family and am currently without health insurance due to the move.  I could have purchased insurance without the marketplace but right at the same time the outbreak began and I felt given my age I would likely be refused and at this point I thought if I survived something this serious what then?  Throw myself under the bus as I would be broke and have no job or even prospects given my age and with the 4 plus million unemployed who is hiring me?. When you have nothing and no one you simply live in the moment.  And perhaps that is why I am vested in being the biggest bitch ever and taking that vow of silence as a means of coping and moving forward until I can come to terms with what this was and how to rationalize this.  I cannot change others behaviors but I can change my response and behavior and so I shall.  In the interim I will still take long walks just stay well away now or even later on. Thanks

No Longer Just a Walk in the Park

The New York Times
By Jodi Kantor
March 27, 2020

I’m 77 years old and I want/need to walk. The two buildings in my complex have a basketball court between them. I have previously taken the freight elevator down 36 stories at 5:30 a.m., meeting no one but armed anyway with mask, gloves, wipes and hand sanitizer. I walked for 35 minutes and went back upstairs, again meeting nobody. Should I force myself to continue? I am simply afraid to go outside.

Ms. Motola’s world has mostly shrunk to one room. She lives by herself in a studio apartment high above Manhattan, with a piano, books and a narrowing set of routines. Her longtime habit of swimming laps is on pause. So are her dates with her children and grandchildren.

“The walking was truly helping me keep it together,” she said on the telephone. But she stopped a week ago and hasn’t left her building since. “As this ramped up, I kept weighing anything and everything I was thinking about doing outside, and saying: ‘Is it worth getting sick for? Is it worth dying for?’”

She’s not the only one asking. The outdoors is now contested ground. Parks and trails from Los Angeles to the Great Smokies are being closed. (Too many people were socially distancing in the same places, and therefore not at all.) Authorities are patrolling others, warning people to disperse. This week, India’s prime minister told 1.3 billion people not to set foot outside their homes. “Stay Home Save Lives” has become a rallying cry and a pressure point on social media.

“If you’re still not sure about an activity, skip it,” said Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, one of 22 states and counting where residents have been told to keep to their residences.

While some continue to congregate, many others are now worried about venturing outside at all. “Can we sit on an open lawn with a family member?” a reader from India wrote to ask.

The unpleasant truth, especially for city dwellers, is that every time you step outdoors, your risk of infection rises. Last week, scientists established that coronavirus droplets could linger in the air for a half-hour, raising new concerns about what is safe. Then there’s every surface you encounter on your way outside and back: doorknobs, keys, elevator buttons, gates, the carton of eggs you pick up at the deli that’s still open.

“The safest way to prevent the spread of this virus is for you to stay at home,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, a global emergency medicine specialist at Columbia. “This virus won’t infect you if it never meets you.”

But when we posed Ms. Motola’s dilemma to Dr. Spencer and other public health experts, along with scientists who study the virus’s behavior in air, each one recommended that she resume her dawn walks.

“We’re all struggling with a greater degree of ambient risk than we’re used to,” said Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious disease specialist and ethicist at the University of Vermont. Each day is an exercise in trying to lower risk: avoid this, scrub that.

Public health practice is as much about reducing risk, as eliminating it — which is often impossible. The AIDS crisis was not stemmed by persuading people to quit sex, Dr. Lahey said. Instead, people adopted tolerable rules like choosing partners carefully and wearing condoms. The term “safer sex” worked because it seemed doable, he added.

The safer-sex equivalent of an outdoor walk, most medical authorities say, is one that involves six feet of distance from others. (Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies how particles move through air, says she gives it 10 feet just to be cautious.) Governments are beginning to put in place rules to encourage people to spread out. This week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a pilot program in New York to close some streets to traffic in order to give pedestrians more space. As of Tuesday, the French must follow new restrictions on outdoor exercise: It can be done alone, for up to an hour a day, within a one-kilometer radius of home. Walkers and runners must carry permission slips that can be checked by authorities.

If the distancing rules are too strict, prohibiting excursions entirely, people could give up, said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, a public health and AIDS specialist at Emory University. “I want to be sure that people don’t get frustrated and say, ‘We won’t be able to defeat this,’ because we can,” he said.

“Our mental health is going to be so important,” added Dr. Spencer, who was treated for Ebola in 2014 and endured 19 days of near-total isolation. “This is only going to get worse.”

“Telling people to stay inside works right now, but in two or three weeks, it’s going to be a tough message to hold up,” he said.

Walks and runs are signs of life to which even doctors and scientists on the front lines are clinging. Amandine Gamble, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a co-author of that study that raised alarm last week about how the virus lingers in the air. She walks near her home in Santa Monica every day. She finds complete adherence to the six-foot rule challenging, she said, and if someone crosses her path, she does not panic.

Dr. Spencer spends his days treating Covid-19 patients at Columbia. When he comes home, he laces up his sneakers and goes jogging, sometimes late at night.

“It’s one of the only ways I can decompress and disconnect completely from coronavirus,” he said.

We called Ms. Motola to share what the experts had advised. She wasn’t convinced.

“I do have to sit and calculate the risk,” she said. “As soon as I contemplate putting on my sneakers, my anxiety goes right up.”

“One of these mornings I will be brave enough,” she said. “I have to be brave.”

There Go I

The expression goes: There by the grace of God go I.  Well thankfully I don’t believe in God or I would think somehow the great Daddy in the sky has spared me from death and/or life of living hell.  I like to think it was luck and sheer determination on my part but on the off chance there is a higher power I guess thanks is in order.

When I read this story it affected me in two ways.  One a survivor of sustaining traumatic brain injury.  I was LUCKY.  I was found in my car unconscious/comatose with a 4mm blood clot in the brain after the lunatic I was out with shoved drugs in my drink, shoved incessant drinks down my throat (although blood alcohol can rise due to Benzodiazepines in the blood system) then enabling me to get behind the wheel of a car which for the grace of god crashed into a pole.  I say that as I wonder had I got home in that state and seized or fell I would never be found for days/weeks/months or had he been with me what he would have done to me and again I would never know or be found.  So by the grace of God I crashed my car.  It however had a downside as it the medical providers at Harborview and the City of Seattle saw me not as a patient but as a drunken whore so once those labels are assigned you can never be healed.

And when I read this story in the New York Times I got it, I really did.  A loner, an outsider as in being Gay, financially secure and very bohemian with no family or partner to advocate or look out for or after.  And with a series of catastrophes he was found with a blood clot on the brain and when he came out of it he sustained one of the more significant types of TBI with short term memory damage. That could have been exacerbated by years of alcohol abuse and in turn the isolation post care without a clear treatment plan or course of action he further deteriorated.  You see that is why my Attorney Kevin Trombold believed that I the drunken whore did not need true legal advice and counsel and in turn cannot to this day explain how I highly functioned while his former associate, Ted Vosk, goes out of his way to explain his depression and rages as a symptom of Traumatic Brain Injury   and continues to try to inflict severe damage through alcohol abuse, car accidents, running accidents and attempted suicide by bear by running to Alaska and taking massive pics putting himself in danger.  I find it quite amusing and tragic all at the same time its Grizzlyman meets Into the Wild but this from a Harvard educated Attorney.  I wish him well on his efforts, hopefully soon he will get it right.  And I leave that to you to decide what that is, my choice is less kind.

I, on the other hand, took it as a challenge to recover and using varying strategies and techniques to stimulate the brain’s plasticity I think I came back stronger than ever.  A bigger bitch but that my be do to the supposed care givers who were anything but.  As the saying goes: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.  I will never be fooled again, right Roger?

The story below is a man who had promise and again because of a lack of network and of course knowledge they simply cast him off to a facility where moments of lucidity are masked by lack of care.  He will only further deteriorate and decline and this in the shadow of Langone who has extensive programs and a facility dedicated to this type of injury.  C’est La Vie as this is where you are when you are an outsider, you are single, old, female, gay, alone or just disposable.  This is America and funny we have more Septuagenarians running for office than not.  Not all of us need to be in the shadows nor deserve to be regardless.

‘The Phantom of Ninth Street’: A Bon Vivant’s Lonely Decline

He lived every New Yorker’s dream life. And then it all slipped away.

By Michael Wilson
The New York Times
Feb. 20, 2020

When the police arrived at his apartment in Greenwich Village, Paul Pannkuk didn’t know what they were talking about.

Someone had entered the apartment next door, taken a random armload of the tenant’s belongings — photo albums, a doormat, a shoe holder — and dumped it all with the garbage in the basement. The burglar was captured on security camera, and he looked an awful lot like Mr. Pannkuk.

He told the officers he had no memory of the incident. He would never steal, he said.

He stood in his once-grand one-bedroom home, with marble floors and windows onto tree-lined West Ninth Street. The home’s former elegance was now hard to imagine.

The living room was dark, most of its lights missing. There was little furniture, and what remained was old and worn, with stuffing sprouting from holes. Newspaper clippings were stacked in tidy piles on the floor beside black-and-white family photographs.

On a side table was a sheet of paper with what looked like random doodles and reminders. In fact, it was a map of sorts for a man hopelessly lost, guideposts to his old life: “Morgan Stanley,” “Drake University,” the name of the composer of “The Music Man” (Meredith Willson). There was a verse from a child’s prayer: “If I should die before I wake/I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Mr. Pannkuk had once lived in comfort approaching extravagance, split between the Village and the Hamptons, his future secured by a career in finance many dreamed to have in 1990s New York. He traveled the world, returning to the city to share his stories with his friends.

Most of those friends were gone now. He had driven them away. At the age of 68, he was on a path many single New Yorkers dread. He was alone, with no one to take care of him, the mysterious occupant of Apartment 1A. But he was too far gone to realize what was happening. His brain no longer worked the way it once did.

His story is one steeped in kindness and frustration and hope misplaced, framed by addiction and a shattering accident on the eve of a new start. It is the tale of a recluse in plain sight, a man left to compulsively wander the place he called home. A friend gave him a dubious title: The Phantom of Ninth Street.

Mr. Pannkuk was a product of the midcentury Midwest, born in 1948 in Mason City, Iowa. He attended Drake University, in Des Moines, studying economics and foreign policy before going to work for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., in 1979.

By the mid-80s, he had moved to New York City with a career on the rise, first as an analyst with Standard & Poor’s, and then — as his cheat sheet reminds him — with Morgan Stanley. He became that firm’s manager of risk in its dealings with some 85 countries on three continents, traveling frequently and living for a time in London.

“Very smart, extremely well read,” said Susan Saxe, a former analyst at Morgan Stanley who worked with Mr. Pannkuk in the ’80s and ’90s. “He knew what was going on in the political regime of any country you could think of.”

His sister, Jan, lived in Illinois and spoke to Mr. Pannkuk often by phone. She knew little of New York, and imagined his days and nights busy with high living. She was not far off.

In a corporate world that leaned steadfastly straight, Mr. Pannkuk was a regular at the city’s gay clubs. Tim Riordan, a Manhattan schoolteacher, met him at a gay bar in the ’90s, “in a long, kind of serpentine coat line at a dance party,” he recalled.

“Mr. Pannkuk was very fun-loving and loved to dance,” Mr. Riordan said. “He mixed the corporate world very well with the world of gay men.”

He lived for several years on the Upper West Side, and in 1990, he moved downtown, buying the one-bedroom on West Ninth Street. Years later, real-estate agents would call the block, between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, the “Gold Coast” of the Village, but in 1990, it retained some of the scruff and bohemian flair of the ’60s and ’70s. He loved his new home.

He also painted — “impeccable reproductions of Picassos,” Mr. Riordan said — and mounted the large works in his living room. “People would walk by at street level and stop dead in their tracks, thinking the owner had an original in there.”

Barbara Martinez, a musician who was raised by her mother, said Mr. Pannkuk, a family friend, was like a father figure. She remembered his annual Christmas parties: “Lots of silver and white balloons,” she said. He had shelves filled with dozens of Champagne flutes.

At some point in any story about Mr. Pannkuk, the teller invariably arrives at a memory of clubbing or having long conversations over drinks — always over drinks. In his younger days, it seemed harmless enough. “When I met him, he drank a fair amount of wine,” a longtime friend, Pablo Scheffel, said. “But we all drank a fair amount of wine.”

As the years passed, the fair amount increased.

In 2005, after 13 years with Morgan Stanley, he left the firm. He was vague when he explained his situation to friends — there was a new boss he didn’t get along with, he said. But some suspected that he was let go. Ms. Saxe, his colleague at Morgan Stanley, had been unaware that his drinking had become a liability — “until, at some point, I knew it had gotten the better of him.”

He was just 56. He started his own consulting firm, and created a LinkedIn profile with blurbs from former colleagues. (“He was a terrific boss and a patient mentor, with great insight into human nature as well as economic analysis.”) He bought a baby grand piano, playing for friends by ear. He had a dog.

And he drank. “Early retirement didn’t serve him well,” Mr. Riordan said.

Adam Cohen, an artist, met Mr. Pannkuk in 2008 through a dating site. “Everything was revolving around a drink,” he said. “‘Let’s meet here for a drink.’ ‘After the gym, let’s have a drink.’”

He was a regular presence at the Lion, a restaurant down the block from the apartment, and French Roast, around the corner. “He’d spend a thousand bucks a week on drinks and lobster pot pies,” Mr. Cohen said.

“He identified a lot with his job. It gave him his identity. He never replaced that,” Mr. Scheffel said. Except, of course, with alcohol. “He told me he would get up at 3 o’clock in the morning and start drinking.”

He would drift from bar to bar. Ms. Martinez, who grew up thinking of Mr. Pannkuk as a part of the family, had a key to his apartment, and would sometimes find him incoherent or passed out.

“He would go on binges,” she said.

The night that changed everything

Six years after he left Morgan Stanley, with no progress toward finding work or keeping vague promises to cut back on his drinking, his friends intervened. In 2011, a group gathered at his apartment and told him he needed real help. He didn’t disagree. Ms. Saxe had found a rehabilitation facility in Connecticut. The night before he was to go there, she called and told him she would pick him up in the morning. Mr. Pannkuk said he would be ready.

The next day, a Saturday in October, Ms. Saxe arrived at West Ninth Street and rang his buzzer. No answer. She feared he had started drinking again, so she headed to the Lion. He wasn’t there. She passed by French Roast and his other haunts, but she didn’t find him.

She returned to the apartment. Worry grew to fear when she heard Mr. Pannkuk’s dog barking inside. She called 911. Firefighters arrived and banged on Mr. Pannkuk’s door, and when they got no answer, they broke it down.

Ms. Saxe was horrified at what she saw. Mr. Pannkuk was lying unconscious on his marble floor, bleeding from his head.

Paramedics arrived and loaded him into an ambulance. Ms. Saxe fought to stay calm. “They were looking around for his shoes, and they pulled out some fancy pair of shoes, and they made a remark about them,” Ms. Saxe said. “I said: ‘You have to understand. He was always so beautifully dressed.’”

He ended up at Bellevue Hospital Center, where doctors discovered a traumatic brain injury caused by his fall.

Mr. Pannkuk seemed to have damaged his medial temporal lobe, a zone in the brain deep behind the ears, where new experiences are converted to long-term memory. His injury permanently disrupted this function. In practice, Mr. Pannkuk is incapable of creating new memories.

Doctors at Bellevue fitted Mr. Pannkuk in a helmet while he healed. He believed he was in London, oblivious to reality. He spent months in the hospital that way.

Ms. Saxe called Mr. Pannkuk’s sister, Jan, after the fall to share the news. “I was shocked,” Jan said. “He was so close to going to a facility that was going to help him.”

She had her own set of health issues within her family in Illinois, but she traveled to New York and visited him at Bellevue. After stopping by the apartment to fetch clothes, she walked the streets of Greenwich Village. “It’s just one bar after another, basically,” she said.

Her brother returned home in 2012 to Ninth Street a very different man. He was no longer able to hold a conversation, losing the thread almost immediately, starting over several times in a period of a few minutes. He had magazines and the newspaper delivered, but he could not comprehend what he was reading.

Worried about his finances, Jan took control of his checking account and the amount of cash available to her brother at the A.T.M., putting him on an allowance.

She soon discovered that he was drinking again, his debit card charges betraying him and listing two, three, even four bar tabs a day at his favorite Village spots. It is not unlikely that he simply forgot earlier visits that day, and entered the bar each time as if it were the first.

She could also tell when he used an A.T.M. He tried to withdraw cash several times a day, even when the account was empty, having forgotten earlier attempts. The pings from the bank brought her comfort.

“I know he’s OK,” she said. “He’s walking around.”

But his old circle of friends were increasingly frustrated.

“I had a relatively young daughter at the time, and I felt I was maybe investing too much time in him,” Ms. Saxe said. “I stopped going around to see him.”

Mr. Riordan would stop by and ask the doormen how his friend was getting along, but he found himself reluctant to ring his bell. He once happened upon a wild-looking Mr. Pannkuk — who in the past had been known to return to his stylist after a haircut if it wasn’t to his liking — shambling along the sidewalk.

“I watched people’s faces as they approached him,” he said. “He was an eyeful — people were having second takes. Little did they know he was about to take a right into a very chic apartment.”

By 2017, he was destroying that apartment from within. He carried his valuable books and treasures from his world travels to the basement for disposal, Mr. Cohen, the artist, said. He threw away his television, his stereo, even his light bulbs, casting the apartment in dim shadows. He threw away food he didn’t remember buying, filling his refrigerator instead with rows of plastic cups of water.

Mr. Cohen began visiting once a week just to make sure Mr. Pannkuk was eating. Ms. Martinez, the friend who looked to him as a father figure, dropped by the liquor stores and the Lion; she claimed to be his daughter and begged them not to serve him anymore.

It was in this period, in the spring of 2017, that Mr. Pannkuk was arrested after throwing away his neighbor’s belongings. In all likelihood, he probably believed he was in his own apartment, and treated those things like he did his own property that he did not recognize.

I first encountered Mr. Pannkuk after reading a police blotter that detailed the bizarre burglary. Why would a 68-year-old man steal random stuff from his neighbor? And then just put it in the trash?

I knocked on his door and was invited into his dark, curious surroundings, where the disheveled man before me told me the same facts about himself, over and over. Morgan Stanley. Drake University. An old friend he expected to arrive any time now. Morgan Stanley. Drake University. Old friend.

He said he was aware of having been hurt in a fall, but that it was minor.

The victim in the burglary case declined to be interviewed for this article, and it’s unclear why he chose to press charges, but in doing so, he set into motion events that pulled the recluse from the shadows and into the city’s view.

Mr. Pannkuk’s sister and friends contacted for this story agreed to speak about his past and present with the understanding that no article would be written until his situation stabilized. Jan, his sister, said she saw an opportunity to share her brother’s story with others facing addiction or brain trauma issues.

After his arrest, Mr. Pannkuk was appointed a lawyer, and while the criminal charge was later dropped, the matter of what to do about Mr. Pannkuk lingered. In 2017, his case was referred to Surrogate’s Court, where he sat in silent bewilderment as his lawyer and representatives from the city and the Mental Hygiene Legal Service, which represents the disabled in need of care, discussed his future before a judge.

The primary obstacle to bringing Mr. Pannkuk the aid available to many New Yorkers was his wealth, as manifested in the apartment on Ninth Street. He had too much money to qualify for free assistance, and not enough for live-in care.

“There are a lot of difficulties going on in your life right now,” Judge Kelly O’Neill Levy told him in September 2017. “The court finds that the appointment of a guardian is necessary.”

At the same time, the apartment building, a co-op, was threatening eviction proceedings against Mr. Pannkuk. His guardian, Sabrina E. Morrissey, a Manhattan lawyer who worked with clients from vulnerable populations, represented him and his wishes to stay in the apartment, but in reality that appeared less and less of an option. His sister and Ms. Morrissey agreed: It was time for him to go.

Late in 2018, his guardian led Mr. Pannkuk, 70, from his apartment of 23 years to his new home. He had no idea that he would never be back. His apartment was going on the market. It would sell quickly for $1 million.

The income from the sale would go to pay for an assisted-living facility in Queens, a journey of some 17 miles, but a world away.

I have visited a few times over the past months. He has a room on a special unit for residents with memory issues. To get to that wing, you pass through a door designed to keep residents from wandering off. It has an alarm that is disarmed with a code that Mr. Pannkuk, if he learns it, is unlikely to remember. The hope for residents like Mr. Pannkuk is that, over time, they become more at ease with their surroundings and come to think of it as home.

Earlier this month, I arrived, and he smiled brightly when he heard his name called.

“Aren’t we in Queens?” he asked, correctly, before inquiring about the status of the impeachment hearings against President Trump.

He sat in his room’s sole chair and crossed his legs. Behind him, three of his prized paintings from his apartment, the Picasso reproductions, leaned against a blank wall. A health aide knocked and offered him a bowl of rice pudding. Mr. Pannkuk asked if she would please put it in the refrigerator.

“I’ve been to London, France, Russia,” he said, and for a moment, he looked like any other retired executive, thinking back over the good times. “I’ve been to India.”

Then, inevitably, that look of comfort shifted to one of urgency, and the room around him changed from comfortable studio to forbidding cell.

“You know, my apartment is in Manhattan,” he said. “I’d love to go home.”

The Reservoir

I have been of late trying to figure out coping strategies for the final six months in Nashville.  My tentative date of departure is October 15 at the latest.  It all hinges on how quickly we can finish the last part of my dental work and in turn how well I can pack and go.  My plan is to start now and I have no problem myself doing the heavy lifting but it is when I have to rely or depend upon others that my resolve falls away.

I am not sure if my depression is just the frustration over the teeth. It is difficult to function and to feel comfortable, I cannot eat what I want and I feel exhausted just dealing with all the issues that surround the care and maintenance of the tissues and the denture as I wait for the next phase to begin. That is when the implants are uncovered, capped and the impressions made to begin for the final teeth to be crafted and in turn installed.   At times it sounds like a car being prepped for repair!

Then there is the frustration this process has alighted, the issues of my temper and my snark to lead me to say things that I should have not, suggesting that a gun to my head would expedite the process and perhaps at least allow for better communication.  Again I tried to manipulate the situation playing victim in a place that lives for victimhood so it led to the Cops coming to my door at 7 am to do a “wellness check.” That threw back most of this a couple of months for me to calm down and try again to find some level of communication that would work.  And that actually never happened as once again I was hauled into a room and asked why I was always alone at my appointments and how did I get there?  Seriously is this for real?  Do I appear incompetent? Apparently.

The struggles began early when I went to the schools, I have written extensively about how horrific those are but I realized that is where much of my energy and passion comes from, children.  To have that one source of energy that filled my reservoir taken has left me depleted in ways even I did not realize.  The trauma, the poverty, the long standing legacy of racism and generational ignorance has affected the culture here like a cancer that cannot be treated let alone cured.

I tried volunteering and found the same smug territorial-ism that I encountered in the community, the eye rolling, the ignoring and the lecturing about how something was done wrong and rarely a kind word or genuine attempt at bonding.  Offers to go for coffee were met with the passive acceptance but later excused as unavailable.  It became a constant push pull to try to meet people and when any offers were made it was to attend their Church, a house I had no interest in visiting.   But I did go and no offers were made to come to lunch, brunch or again but prayers were proffered and I accepted them with the intent they were given, with grace.  But once over I was alone again.

My days were spent futilely and desperately between Yoga classes, long walks, online shopping, book reading, and sitting at varying coffee shops reading the New York Times and harassing the staff for laughs.  When bored I would go through my endless stash of no longer fitting clothes, things I did not want nor need and pass them off, not to buy friendship but to stave off guilt for my sitting there for hours having nowhere to go and no one to go home to.   I would have gotten a pet but when I knew I was here for the short time there was no way I would make that kind of commitment and I watched how people here seemed to connect and relate to their pets – they had them and they walked them, rarely cleaned up after them, the dogs and even cats seemed desperate for attention and they too glommed onto each passer by as a potential friend.   I saw myself in those animals and felt what they felt.

I have tried drinking too much, crying not enough and mediation to stave off the anger, the rage, the sadness and the like and it never did more than make me feel worse.  As I watch my reservoir deplete I worried that it would one day take a torrential down pour to refill it and then it would overflow and burst as a result changing the landscape forever.  My greatest fear seemed to get closer with every day that passes and as we have come to learn with global warming it can snow in May so I am on full Weather Alert between now and my time to depart but every day seems to bring more rage and anger.

I worry that my personal reservoir can never be full enough to be sustainable and as a result I am permanently damaged in a way that further closes me off.     Every effort to try to build a friendship or some type of healthy relationship has led me to hit the proverbial wall.  One can only hit a wall so much before the cracks lead to total collapse.

Withdrawal and retreat is a tactic of war and of sports only the idea is to rethink one’s strategy and find the opponents weak spot in which to wring out defeat.  You wring out dish clothes and rags and I am one rag of a towel.

A loner by nature is not of nature as we all have to eventually find a tribe, a pack, a school, a colony, a swarm, a collective in which to belong and to feel a part of a whole.  I cannot even find a half anymore.  I laughed when I saw the #SexStrike. Really? Can you strike from a job that you do not do anymore?  And was it a job?  At times it felt that way and the times it did not I could walk away I would cross that picket line.  I miss sex but its men I don’t miss or maybe its just the men I used to know. 

I used to say it is not the size that matters (take that however you want) but it is the quality of that which you take or is given to savor and take pleasure from.  Well I know at age 60 there is no one who wants even a taste.  The water has sat to long in this reservoir to be of use, it is stagnant.  Funny water is deep as am I.

The ICE

The infamous note on all applications:  “In case of Emergency” and the contact name.  For years I put my dog and my home phone.  And I found out the hard way that people rarely do more than go through your phone list and look to last number called or send the Police to your door to find your next of kin.

On February 9, 2012 I found out first hand that without said contact or that individual to act as an advocate you are fucked beyond belief.  There are no other words.  Professionals have no time nor desire to make rational decisions about your care and well being given that they have to when no one else is available.

The staff at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle failed to help me and propelled me into a nightmare that I have yet to fully awaken from and I wonder if I ever will.  It has made me even more afraid and distrustful so finding that elusive ICE is something that I doubt I will ever have.

And that is my trigger, that query about having friends or some “other” that is somehow responsible for me.  It was what led me to become angry at the Dentists office when the Patient Counselor asked me about my relationships here, what Church I belong and perhaps there I would find a husband. All three things that had nothing to do with my intended treatment, I am having dental implants not major surgery and if I was they have these things called home care workers whom I could hire if so needed.  We are talking dental surgery here and I am well familiar with the process so I can easily assure anyone that this is not as big as an issue as they are making it out to be.  But because that is my trigger I got angry and said, “well if this is such an issue or a problem I will just blow my teeth out of my head and solve it as it has to be easier than this bullshit.” 

Okay, 4 days later the Cops showed up at my door on a wellness check. On Wednesday I was just in the Dentists office to begin some type of adjustments and prep for the intended treatment. It was a cluster fuck as always but I was well finally used to it and I am just moving forward in my mind with it.  But in my snark manner I was quite firm with, “well not a problem that we can’t do this today but no cops this time okay?”  She was shocked and was quite responsive. I understood her reasoning behind it but she also did not know the back story of how the comment came to be.  I did not elaborate as to why I go ballistic but I was quite clear that I am a fully functioning adult who is depressed over the endless frustrations while I await said reconstruction, that it has been 5 years, a Dentist whom I used to respect and my own issues for why I chose to move across country rather than continue with it in Seattle.  And some of that too is for the reasons unspoken and connected to that infamous night that at some point I need to get past.  I truly believe my teeth will be the bridge that will finally get me to move onward and forward.  If not then I can seek help and work on that anger that holds me from crossing.

But I have been worried about my increasing isolation.  I hate my job and it truly bothers me.  I watched today and 4 young black women went on and on and sung in a class to the point of absurd, I tried to talk to them as a means of engaging them about the work they had on Dictators but it was a waste of time. The black children I meet in the schools are so damaged they are abusive to each other and to anyone they perceive as weak or vulnerable.  It makes me sick and ashamed that I am a part of this system and have to go to lengths to shut down an entire race as a means to cope.  Then I read this today and once again I did not feel better in the least.  Did it explain what I already knew? Yes but in my world the Miracle Worker was a movie and a good one and I am no Miracle Worker.

And then I also read the article below.  Loneliness is crippling in ways that cannot be seen. I wrote recently about Vancouver’s attempts to open minds and hearts in a closed off city and I said it was everywhere.  Here in the South it is perhaps even worse as the income inequality is so ingrained that it permeates you like an overripe cheese that tastes even worse.

So I just put my feelings on ice and hope that I can get out of here like a good Champagne waiting to be corked. It cannot come soon enough.

How Loneliness Begets Loneliness

Olga Khazan The Atlantic Apr 6, 2017
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Social isolation kills, and in the process it makes it harder to reach out to others. A psychologist explains how to break the cycle.

“I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary,” wrote Billy Baker in his recent exploration of male loneliness in The Boston Globe.

Perhaps one reason the piece made so many internet rounds is just how many people could relate: Last year Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned that Americans are “facing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.”

Though “I’m going to die alone” is the common grumble among single people, scientifically, it’s more like, “I’m going to die if I’m alone.” A lack of social connections can spark inflammation and changes in the immune system, so lonely people are far more likely to die prematurely. Loneliness is more dangerous than obesity, and it’s about as deadly as smoking. The threat is considered so serious that England has created an entire “Campaign to End Loneliness.”

But in a cruel twist, the loneliest among us are set up to get lonelier still. People with few social connections experience brain changes that cause them to be more likely to view human faces as threatening, making it harder for them to bond with others.

To learn more about this conundrum, and how to resolve it, I recently spoke with John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who wrote a book on loneliness and has researched the phenomenon extensively. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan: Are people getting lonelier, and if so, why?

John Cacioppo: When you look across studies, you get levels anywhere from 25 to 48 percent [of people reporting being lonely]. I’ve seen some out of London that suggest 50 percent of Londoners feel lonely, but that’s not a longitudinal sample, so take that with a grain of salt.

The longest subsample is the Health and Retirement Study in the United States. That’s a study the federal government has been running for decades now, and those are the data I base our own estimates on. When we look at that survey, it looks like loneliness is around 27, 28 percent. Our best estimates based on that means it’s increased anywhere on the order of 3 to 7 percent over the last 20 years.

Khazan: That’s not huge, but is there an explanation for that uptick? Is that just that people are getting older, and older people tend to live alone?

Cacioppo: First of all, let me qualify something. Living alone, being alone, and the size of your social network is only weakly related. Think about patients in hospitals: They aren’t alone, they have all the support they could ask for, but they tend to feel very lonely. There’s a difference between being alone and feeling alone. People in marriages tend to feel less lonely than people not in marriages. However people in marriages can feel extraordinarily alone when they feel alienated from their spouse and family. They’re so weakly correlated, we need to take objective isolation and perceived isolation and separate those two.

In animals, it’s not separating a monkey from any companion, it’s separating them from a preferred companion. When we do that, we see the same effects in those monkeys that we see in humans; they feel lonely.

Khazan: So why the slight uptick in loneliness?

Cacioppo: We know that there’s a number of cultural factors and environmental factors. For instance, the internet has increased connectivity. But if you ever find yourself [looking at] your texts and emails at an event with your family, you may realize that those digital connections don’t mean that you feel more connected.

If you use those [digital] connections as a way station—kids tend to do this; they use Facebook so that they can then meet up somewhere—it’s associated with lower levels of loneliness. If it’s used as a destination—and ironically, lonely people tend to do this, they tend to withdraw socially because it’s punishing, and interacting digitally perhaps as a non-authentic self, makes them feel more like they’re accepted. But it doesn’t actually make them feel less lonely.

If the only acceptance you can get of yourself is a fake representation on the web, that’s not going to make you feel connected. But if you look at online dating, there you’re using it to meet other people, so not surprisingly, that tends to be associated with lower levels of loneliness.

Khazan: Why do people who are lonely interpret social situations more negatively?

Cacioppo: There’s two ways to think about it. One is what’s going on pre-attentively, and one that’s going on consciously. [For example,] when you get hungry, you can feel it, you want to have some food. Its purpose is to motivate you to seek food before you are so low on fuel that you can no longer have the energy [to do so].

And loneliness motivates you to repair or replace connections that you feel are threatened or lost. So people pay more attention to social information because they’re motivated to reconnect.

So in hunger, you are [much] more sensitive to bitter than to sweet tastes. The reason for that development is that bitter tastes, evolutionarily speaking, were associated with poisons. What that means is if you’re really hungry, you’re going to spit out palatable, bitter food even though you’re trying to find something to keep you alive.

Same thing with loneliness. If you look at early humans and other hominids, they were not uniformly positive toward each other. We exploit each other, we punish each other, we threaten each other, we coerce. And so it isn’t that I want to connect with anyone, I need to worry about friend or foe. Just like bitter versus sweet, poison vs. non poison, if I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, that’s okay, I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive.

But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they’re a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias.

That sets up an expectation, because what I expect is often what I see. If I think you’re going to be hostile, I’m going to answer questions very differently than if I trust you.

You’re motivated to connect. But promiscuous connection with others can lead to death. A neural mechanism kicks in to make you a little skeptical or dubious about connecting.

Khazan: Some studies have found that creating more opportunities for social interaction, or even improving social skills, doesn’t really help reduce loneliness. Why not?

Cacioppo: Social interaction is sometimes called social engagement, basically the idea there is that loneliness can be cured by putting people together. As in, if they’re not alone, they wont feel lonely. Colleges think this, which is why they have mixers. You remember mixers in college? They don’t work.

Being with others doesn’t mean you’re going to feel connected, and being alone doesn’t mean you’re going to feel lonely. It can, but usually we choose to be alone.

A new mother with a newborn she loves—loves playing with the baby—that does not mean the husband shouldn’t give her a break, let her go off and regenerate, have some time to herself, so that she can return and continue to be absolutely generous and loving and adoring. That time alone enhances social connections, it doesn’t contract it.

Khazan: What is social support, then?

Cacioppo: There are programs like this for highly lonely elderly people. They provide social support, they bring them food, they might meet with them for once a month. Doing that is actually helping these people. Their biggest fear is they’re going to die and no one will ever know it. And that their body will sit and rot, which is a pretty horrific thought. And the fact that they’re visited once a month provides solace to them.

That’s a different issue than making them feel less lonely. They are getting social support, it is addressing a serious problem, but it’s not going to do very much for their level of loneliness. It just solves the existential fear of no one ever knowing not only that they were ever on earth, but that they even perished.

Khazan: How would you do therapy to try to help people who think they’re lonely but are nonetheless wary of connecting with people?

Cacioppo: What we teach is a whole set of skills: How do you read the face, the voice, the posture of people? And we showed them how incorrect those readings can be. So there are ways, and they can lead to correct answers, but they can also lead to highly incorrect answers, and we showed how that happens.

So how do you verify? You’re open but you’re watchful, you’re vigilant. You test hypotheses. So if you’re at that party, you might talk to others and you give them a chance.

The other thing we’ve shown is that loneliness, interestingly, is related to an increase in egocentrism. Self-preservation depends more on your attention to your outcomes when you’re lonely than when you have lots of connections. [Sometimes] if you talk to a lonely person, they’ll start talking to you and you can’t get away. So, how do you share rather than just barrage? It’s about interactions, it’s about synergy, it’s about mutuality.

Khazan: What advice do you have for people who feel lonely? Are there any practical steps they can take?

Cacioppo: One of the biggest misunderstandings is what loneliness is. They equate it with being alone, and that leads to attempts to solve the problem that don’t solve the problem at all. And if you try enough times, you start to feel like, “Well, I’ll never be able to solve this, I’m just a worthless person.” And that’s when you start getting social withdrawal.

The purpose of loneliness is like the purpose of hunger. Hunger takes care of your physical body. Loneliness takes care of your social body, which you also need to survive and prosper. We’re a social species.

One notion that people intuitively have is it’s just about being with other people, and we’ve already talked about how that’s wrong. The other thing is that it’s just about social support—“I need more support.” And that doesn’t work very well because the logic of that is it’s not mutual. Just getting support doesn’t actually make you feel very good. This is one of the reasons why when we do something for others, we tend to feel good. If you go cook at a soup kitchen, all of a sudden you start finding out that people can actually be pretty nice, they’re responding with gratitude.

The third common thing is that it’s social skills, that people with poor social skills are the ones who are lonely. Well, guess what? That’s not the case. If you have really bad social skills, you’re more likely to be lonely, that’s true. But lots of people feel lonely who have great social skills. Millionaires, billionaires, tend to feel lonely. A lot of athletes often feel lonely. Lots of people want to be their friend, but how would you feel if all the people who want to be your friend, you had the alternative interpretation that they want material or social benefits that you could give them.

This is why you see some [famous] athletes from [poor] neighborhoods not severing those ties, even though it’s clearly to their benefit if they were to do so. Those are the only relationships they know are real, are authentic.

Khazan: Is there something lonely people should be doing proactively, like going to a book club or soup kitchen?

Cacioppo: Do volunteer service in something that you enjoy. I’ve developed the acronym EASE—ease your way back into social connections. The first E stands for “extend yourself,” but extend yourself safely. Do a little bit at a time.

The A is “have an action plan.” Recognize that it’s hard for you. Most people don’t need to like you, and most people won’t. So deal with that, it’s not a judgment of you, there’s lots of things going on. Ask [other people] about themselves, get them talking about their interests.

The S is “seek collectives.” People like similar others, people who have similar interests, activities, values. That makes it easier to find a synergy.

And finally when you do those things, “Expect” the best. The reason for that is to try to counteract this hyper-vigilance for social threat.

I VANT TO BE ALONE

For those too young to recall that infamous statment by the late acrtes Greta Garbo, it was in response to her leaving the fame and fortune of Hollywood for a live of privacy. It was actually a little more of both theatricality and reality:

Her aversion to publicity and the press was undeniably genuine, and exasperating to the studio at first. In an interview in 1928, she explained that her desire for privacy began when she was a child, stating “as early as I can remember, I have wanted to be alone. I detest crowds, don’t like many people.” But MGM eventually capitalized on it, for it bolstered the image of the silent and reclusive woman of mystery.

She is closely associated with a line from Grand Hotel, one which the American Film Institute in 2005 voted the 30th most memorable movie quote of all time, “I want to be alone; I just want to be alone.” The theme became a running gag beginning in her silent pictures.

And then I read the article below from NY Mag and some of them I did laugh as many of those women quoted are more infamous for the love affairs and marriages they had during their time of “alone-ness.”

25 Famous Women on Being Alone
By Julie Ma
NY MAG

“That old-maid myth is garbage.” —Diane Keaton \

Depending on who you are, the very thought of spending time alone will send your heart racing with delight or despair. For extroverts, alone time can be an almost-withering experience. For introverts, it can be a crucial sanctuary and a chance to recharge.

While the days of openly calling single women “old maids,” “spinsters,” or “cat ladies” are nearing extinction, the social stigma surrounding ladies who are uncoupled by choice or by chance still runs deep. Below, 25 accomplished women — including Shonda Rhimes and Diane Keaton — discuss what being alone and living as single, independent women means to them.

Shonda Rhimes

“I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I only ever write about one thing: being alone. The fear of being alone, the desire to not be alone, the attempts we make to find our person, to keep our person, to convince our person to not leave us alone, the joy of being with our person and thus no longer alone, the devastation of being left alone. The need to hear the words: You are not alone … Every single time it comes down to one thing. You are not alone. Nobody should be alone. So I write.” — Human Rights Campaign’s Los Angeles gala, March 2015

Mindy Kaling

“It’s funny, I used to freak out about being single much more in my twenties. I’ve noticed that the more professional success I have, or the more happy I am professionally, the less I worry about that because I have a great deal of professional confidence. I’ve noticed whenever I’ve felt the most boy crazy or when I wanted to get married it was when I was not so happy professionally. I have this thing and it’ll happen like five times a year on a Sunday night, the feeling like, Oh, a family would be great. Not even being in a relationship — but a family because I’m 35. I think what snaps me out of it is just the fact that I love being by myself. I think that if I was in the wrong relationship, which I have been in several, that would be so much worse than the feeling of autonomy I feel right now.” — BuzzFeed, March 2015

Rebecca Traister

“It’s nuts that people assume singlehood to be an immature period, just because it’s an unmarried period. Living singly in your twenties and thirties — and beyond — isn’t a tryout for life: It is real life … The expanding population of unmarried women, especially low-income women, is going to force — I hope — the government to acknowledge that women are not reliant on husbands as earners and cannot simply be home with children or pick them up from school every day. Social policy must reckon with single women and the fact that they require the same kind of economic aid and consideration from the government that men have received since its founding, i.e., tax breaks, improved housing policy, more welfare, paid leave.” —Elle, February 2016

Susan Cain

“People sometimes seem surprised when I say this, because I’m a pretty friendly person. This is one of the greatest misconceptions about introversion. We are not anti-social; we’re differently social. I can’t live without my family and close friends, but I also crave solitude. I feel incredibly lucky that my work as a writer affords me hours a day alone with my laptop. I also have a lot of other introvert characteristics, like thinking before I speak, disliking conflict, and concentrating easily … introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward. In our culture, snails are not considered valiant animals — we are constantly exhorting people to ‘come out of their shells’ — but there’s a lot to be said for taking your home with you wherever you go.” —Scientific American, January 2012

Susan Sarandon

“[Being alone]’s been a lot of different things. It’s traumatic and exhilarating. The one thing that’s been really clear to me is that you have to think of your own life and your relationship and everything as a living organism. It’s constantly moving, changing, growing. I think long-term relationships need to be constantly reevaluated and talked about.” —Reuters, March 2012

Stevie Nicks

“Most women would not be happy being me. People say, ‘But you’re alone.’ But I don’t feel alone. I feel very un-alone. I feel very sparkly and excited about everything. I know women who are going, like, ‘I don’t want to grow old alone.’ And I’m like, ‘See, that doesn’t scare me.’ Because I’ll never be alone. I’ll always be surrounded by people. I’m like the crystal ball and these are all the rings of Saturn around me … My generation fought very hard for feminism, and we fought very hard to not be labeled as you had to have a husband or you had to be in a relationship, or you were somehow not a cool chick. And now I’m seeing that start to come around again, where people say to you, ‘Well, what do you mean you don’t have a boyfriend? You don’t want to have one? You don’t want to be married?’ And you’re like, ‘Well, no, I don’t, actually. I’m fine.’ And they find a lot of reasons why you’re not fine. But it just seems to be coming back. Being able to take care of myself is something that my mom really instilled in me. I can remember her always saying, ‘If nothing else, I will teach you to be independent.’” — Vulture, June 2013

Carrie Brownstein

“I think alone time is good to know how to be alone with your own thoughts. I think it just helps you kind of be a better, more grounded person … and also I feel like it builds a sense of self confidence and a sureness that you know that you can venture out into experiences without the crutch of other people. Like, you’re not doing it because you feel lonely or isolated, but because it generates a new kind of experience.” — Spin, October 2015

Katharine Hepburn

“I put on pants 50 years ago and declared a sort of middle road. I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself and I ain’t afraid of being alone.” — the New York Times, May 1981

Chelsea Handler

“It’s not just O.K. to be single for both men and women — it’s wonderful to be single, and society needs to embrace singlehood in all its splendiferous, solitary glory. Next time you see a single woman, instead of asking her where her boyfriend, husband or eunuch is, congratulate her on her accomplished sense of self and for reaching the solitary mountaintop by herself without a ring on her finger weighing her down like a male paperweight. Without single women and their impressive sense of self, we’d be without Queen Elizabeth I, Marie-Sophie Germain, Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Diane Keaton, Greta Garbo, Jane Goodall and me, myself and I. Being single is delightfully more than it’s cracked up to be … if you can stand the horror of your own company, that is.” — Time, May 2016

Fran Lebowitz

“That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires — smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge — are basically solitary pursuits. Oh, sure, sometimes a friend or two drops by and we light up together and occasionally I bounce a few vengeance ideas around with a willing companion, but actual meetings are really unnecessary.” — The Fran Lebowitz Reader, November 1994

Leandra Medine

“When I’m left by myself and I have some time to be alone, that’s the time I have to recuperate and re-validate how I am feeling about myself. That’s always when I feel like I’m being given an opportunity to really start to love myself again — it’s a really special time. I think that women think they’re afraid to be alone, but they’re conflating fear with discomfort. Dealing with that discomfort is so important.” — Paper magazine, February 2015

Diane Keaton

“I remember when I was young I honestly believed in some ridiculous way that you would find someone who would be the person you lived with until you died. I don’t think that because I’m not married it’s made my life any less. That old-maid myth is garbage.” — Wenn, July 2001

Jennifer Lawrence

“It’s not a sad thing to be alone. I think what I was trying to get across was that I don’t feel a lack of something not being in a relationship. I don’t feel like there is a hole to be filled … An emotional hole to be filled. My dad’s here!” — TimesTalks, December 2015

Constance Wu

“I’d rather lose all my stuff than lose myself, because I’ve done that before, and that feels way worse. I don’t have the best family life. I’m not going to have a sob story and be like, my parents abandoned me, because they didn’t. But they also are not that present. When I’m alone, I’m alone. I don’t have anybody to call, and so I have to create meaning from myself. That’s why I don’t give a fuck, because I can’t lose anything. What I have I make myself.” — Vulture, June 2016

Cheryl Strayed

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.” — Wild, March 2012

Rashida Jones

“I had the full princess fantasy: the white horse, the whole being saved from my life, which is ridiculous. What do I want to be saved from? My life’s great! But it’s just this weird thing that’s been hammered into my head culturally: that’s the only way to succeed, that’s the only thing that counts for a woman. I’m happy, but the fact that I’m not married and don’t have kids — it’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I actually am OK with that, where I actually don’t feel like I’m some sort of loser.” — The Guardian, February 2014

Julie Delpy

“Too many women throw themselves into romance because they’re afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won’t do that.” — San Jose Mercury News, December 1997

Joan Rivers

“I’m so independent now, I’m so set in my ways … I hate the part where I come home from a trip and there’s no one to call. And I miss the Sundays doing nothing together. But I do like my freedom … I won’t go to a restaurant alone, because people will say, ‘Oh I saw poor Joan Rivers.’ … I do [go to parties alone] — but I dislike it. I am very shy when I don’t know people. I had to go to Charles and Camilla’s wedding alone and that was so difficult. I mean wonderful when I got there but very hard arriving.” — The Guardian, August 2005

Audrey Hepburn

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.” — LIFE, December 1953

Yoko Ono

“The precious part of my day is when I’m alone. When everybody goes home and (son) Sean’s asleep and I’m just watching the night lights out of my window or something. I like silence, you see. I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that it’s all right to be alone.” — Ocala Star Banner, June 1983

Jane Fonda

“I have a friend who says she has become a nerd cause she doesn’t go out or hang anymore with her buds. I told her I understood cause I was part nerd too and I realized that my blog gives the impression that I am always surrounded by excitement and people. But the fact is that I spend much time alone and cherish that. I don’t write about that cause what’s to say. ‘I am alone, thinking, reading, meditating…’ Isn’t so interesting so my blog gives a false impression of my life. I identify with the bear who hibernates much of the time–in fact, has her cubs alone while she sleeps–but then needs to be social, playful. That’s me. I am alone a lot. I read a lot. I meditate. I love solitude. It’s different than loneliness. I am not always surrounded by excitement. That’s just what I blog about. Anyway, I wanted to set that straight. I, too, am part nerd.” — her site, July 2010

Gertrude Stein

“After all human beings are like that. When they are alone they want to be with others and when they are with others they want to be alone.” – Paris France, 1940

Grace Jones

“I have made a big effort in my life to enjoy being alone, so that I don’t enter a relationship only because I am afraid of being on my own. I enjoy my own company because there is no guarantee even if you are in a couple that the match will last all your life. And I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have!…The key is to make friends with yourself. Children make imaginary friends. If I have to do that, I will do that. They will say I’m crazy, but I will be happy. Sometimes it is better to find ways to be happy alone than to have a relationship in which you are miserable for the sake of not being alone.” — I’ll Never Write My Memoirs, September 2015

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Justice O’Connor and I were together for more than twelve years and in every one of those twelve years, sooner or later, at oral argument one lawyer or another would call me Justice O’Connor. They were accustomed to the idea that there was a woman on the Supreme Court and her name was Justice O’Connor. Sandra would often correct the attorney, she would say, ‘I’m Justice O’Connor, she’s Justice Ginsburg.’ The worst times were the years I was alone. The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see. But now, with the three of us on the bench, I am no longer lonely and my newest colleagues are not shrinking violets. Not this term but the term before, Justice Sotomayor beat out Justice Scalia as the justice who asks the most questions during argument.” — The New Republic, September 2014

Dolly Parton

“My nails are my rhythm section, when I’m writing a song all alone. Some day, I may cut an album, just me and my nails.” — Roger Ebert, December 1980

Alone Again, Naturally

Ah the three day weekend full of last minute summer plans, BBQ’s, and other final acts to mark the end of one season and the beginning of another.

I moved across country this year to Nashville from Seattle. A native of Seattle I understood the Seattle Freeze and I accepted it.  I never felt lonely as all I had to do was look to the left and right and see really ugly unhappy people in forced relationships as a means to avoid actually making friends and being social, that I never felt alone or lonely.

It is probably why I love NYC and that there you can be alone and never alone.  You can be lonely and within minutes find an activity that will assauge said loneliness.

I am very much alone in Nashville and with it lonely.  I don’t miss Seattle there is too much water under that bridge to ever look back at rebuilding it.  I hated my job, I hated my house and I hated every waking minute of being there.  I will take loneliness over that intense rage any day of the week.

In Nashville I suspect for me to connect the only way will be through a Church and that I have not felt compelled or willing as despite being a believer and liking faith, I have a feeling that in Nashville once you join it is like a tattoo that you come to regret as it was in a moment of drunkeness or idiocy and I don’t want to join somewhere to just fill the ache of having no friends.

It hit me hard the first day I filled in my application with the Nashville Public Schools and they had the “In case of Emergency” portion to complete.  The head of the department came by and asked why it was blank.  I responded that I had just moved here and don’t know anyone well enough to designate such an important notice.  She then asked about anyone from where I was from.  “No,” was my definitive response.  She shook her head and walked away.

Well first of all those are bullshit.  I know for a fact that no one actually does know who to call and that if I was in a public school and some attack, they call 911 and they in turn have the hospital raid your phone.  They may or may not call the schools to find out contact info but given the time, the office would be closed or they would not have access. Trusting a school district to give a flying fuck about a Substitute Teacher is laughable.  I often when pressed put my dead dog and my old phone number down.

The idea of ICE is quite important to me and why I also lock my phone now.  I have just my ID and that is enough.   I know what first hand these fuckers do when they raid your phone and call people in the middle of an emergency.  I have yet to ever reconcile, forgive or forget what Harborview Medical Center did to me.

So I have massive trust issues. I always have and now it is firmly in my character to utterly warn anyone treating me that I am very alone and this is all on me.   The end.

I do worry about this and my mental health and know that I will have to leave Nashville in the next 3-4 years.  I don’t feel as unsafe here but I don’t think I will ever build community here.  This is a magical place but magic is a trick.

I have joined Meetups and that was abject failure.  Again I take my share of responsibility but I do know manners and good hosting and neither of those things were apparent on my first go around. I wanted to join a writers group but the male host was so creepy and weird that again that is my “trigger warning” and I extricated myself with positive affirmations and thanks and ran for the door.

So I have work to do.  And when I read this today I thought I am not alone.

The Health Effects of Growing Old, and Lonely

By KATIE HAFNER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SEPT. 5, 2016

BLACKPOOL, England — The woman on the other end of the phone spoke lightheartedly of spring and of her 81st birthday the previous week.

“Who did you celebrate with, Beryl?” asked Alison, whose job was to offer a kind ear.

“No one, I…”

And with that, Beryl’s cheer turned to despair.

Her voice began to quaver as she acknowledged that she had been alone at home not just on her birthday, but for days and days. The telephone conversation was the first time she had spoken in more than a week.

About 10,000 similar calls come in weekly to an unassuming office building in this seaside town at the northwest reaches of England, which houses The Silver Line Helpline, a 24-hour call center for older adults seeking to fill a basic need: contact with other people.

Loneliness, which Emily Dickinson described as “the Horror not to be surveyed,” is a quiet devastation. But in Britain, it is increasingly being viewed as something more: a serious public health issue deserving of public funds and national attention.

Working with local governments and the National Health Service, programs aimed at mitigating loneliness have sprung up in dozens of cities and towns. Even fire brigades have been trained to inspect homes not just for fire safety but for signs of social isolation.

“There’s been an explosion of public awareness here, from local authorities to the Department of Health to the media,” said Paul Cann, chief executive of Age UK Oxfordshire and a founder of The Campaign to End Loneliness, a five-year-old group based in London. “Loneliness has to be everybody’s business.”

Researchers have found mounting evidence linking loneliness to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline. As a predictor of early death, loneliness eclipses obesity.

“The profound effects of loneliness on health and independence are a critical public health problem,” said Dr. Carla M. Perissinotto, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco. “It is no longer medically or ethically acceptable to ignore older adults who feel lonely and marginalized.”

In Britain and the United States, roughly one in three people older than 65 live alone, and in the United States, half of those older than 85 live alone. Studies in both countries show the prevalence of loneliness among people older than 60 ranging from 10 percent to 46 percent.

While the public, private and volunteer sectors in Britain are mobilizing to address loneliness, researchers are deepening their understanding of its biological underpinnings. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Cell, neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology identified a region of the brain they believe generates feelings of loneliness. The region, known as the dorsal raphe nucleus, or D.R.N., is best known for its link to depression.

Kay M. Tye and her colleagues found that when mice were housed together, dopamine neurons in the D.R.N. were relatively inactive. But after the mice were isolated for a short period, the activity in those neurons surged when those mice were reunited with other mice.

“This is the first time we’ve found a cellular substrate for this experience,” said Dr. Tye, an assistant professor at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at M.I.T. and a senior author of the paper. “And we saw the change after 24 hours of isolation.”

John T. Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and director of the university’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, has been studying loneliness since the 1990s. He said loneliness is an aversive signal much like thirst, hunger or pain.

“Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hunger,” he said. Yet the very word “lonely” carries a negative connotation, Professor Cacioppo said, signaling social weakness, or an inability to stand on one’s own.

The unspoken stigma of loneliness is amply evident during calls to The Silver Line. Most people call asking for advice on, say, roasting a turkey. Many call more than once a day. One woman rings every hour to ask the time. Only rarely will someone speak frankly about loneliness.

Yet the impulse to call in to services like The Silver Line is a healthy one, Professor Cacioppo said.

On a recent afternoon, Tracey, a Silver Line adviser, listened as a caller in his 80s embarked on a nostalgic trip down his list of favorite films. The next caller serenaded Tracey with “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” on his harmonica.

Once the harmonica player had hung up, a call came in from an 88-year-old man with an avalanche of memories to share: dogs he had owned, boats he had captained, London during the blitz. Tracey, a former nurse, listened patiently for 30 minutes.

“It can be really fascinating when people talk about things like London during the bombing,” she said after the call ended. “It’s important to remember the rich lives people have led.”

Silver Line workers leave it up to the caller to mention whether they are feeling lonely. Still, the advisers are trained to listen for signs of unhappy isolation, and gently lead the conversation accordingly, perhaps offering to link the caller to a Silver Line Friend, a volunteer who makes weekly phone calls or writes letters to those who request it.

Sophie Andrews, chief executive of The Silver Line, said she was surprised by the explosion of calls shortly after the service began operating nearly three years ago. The Blackpool call center now receives some 1,500 calls a day.

Ms. Andrews said she was most concerned not about those who called The Silver Line, but those who were too depressed by their isolation to pick up the phone. “We need to raise awareness with the people who are the hardest to reach,” she said.

Professor Cacioppo lauds efforts like The Silver Line, yet he warns that the problem of loneliness is nuanced and the solutions not as obvious as they might seem. That is, a call-in line can help reduce feelings of loneliness temporarily, but is not likely to reduce levels of chronic loneliness.

In his research, Professor Cacioppo has shown that loneliness affects several key bodily functions, at least in part through overstimulation of the body’s stress response. Chronic loneliness, his work has shown, is associated with increased levels of cortisol, a major stress hormone, as well as higher vascular resistance, which can raise blood pressure and decrease blood flow to vital organs.

Professor Cacioppo’s research has also shown that the danger signals activated in the brain by loneliness affect the production of white blood cells; this can impair the immune system’s ability to fight infections.

It is only in the past several years that loneliness has been examined through a medical, rather than psychological or sociological, lens. Dr. Perissinotto, the University of California, San Francisco geriatrician, decided to study loneliness when she began to sense there were factors affecting her patients’ health that she was failing to capture.

Using data from a large national survey of older adults, in 2012 Dr. Perissinotto analyzed the relationship between self-reported loneliness and health outcomes in people older than 60. Of 1,604 participants in the study, 43 percent reported feelings of loneliness, and these individuals had significantly higher rates of declining mobility, difficulty in performing routine daily activities, and death during six years of follow-up. The association of loneliness with mortality remained significant even after adjusting for age, economic status, depression and other common health problems.

Dr. Perissinotto is also interested in examining the link between loneliness and suicidal thoughts, as there has been little research in that area. She hopes to study The Friendship Line, a 24-hour, toll-free, loneliness call-in line run by the Institute on Aging in San Francisco that is also a suicide prevention hotline.

Although plenty of research into loneliness takes place in the United States, Britain remains well ahead in addressing the problem.

“In the U.S., there isn’t much recognition in terms of public health initiatives or the average person recognizing that loneliness has to do with health,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, whose studies also link loneliness to deteriorating health.

Age UK, an organization similar to AARP in the United States, oversees an array of programs aimed at decreasing loneliness and coordinates efforts with fire brigades to look for signs of loneliness and isolation in the homes they enter.

Another charity, Open Age, runs some 400 activities each week in Central London — sewing circles, current events discussions, book clubs and exercise and computer classes, held at church halls, sport centers, housing projects — and its employees also visit people in their homes to try to get them out and about.

“We try to work out what it is that’s preventing them from leaving the house,” said Helen Leech, the organization’s director.

Men and women differ greatly in how they grapple with loneliness. Seventy percent of the calls to The Silver Line are from women.

“We have this kind of male pride thing,” said Mike Jenn, 70, a retired charity worker who lives in London. “We say, ‘I can look after myself. I don’t need to talk to anyone,’ and it’s a complete fallacy. Not communicating helps to kill us.”

Mr. Jenn runs a “Men’s Shed” in London’s Camden Town district, which aims to bring older men together in a more familiar and comfortable environment — working side by side in a woodworking shop. The concept began in Australia and has since spread to Britain: There are now more than 300 Men’s Sheds throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.

Keith Pearshouse, 70, a retired school principal, discovered the Men’s Shed near his home after moving to London from Norfolk, England, in 2007 and recognizing he was lonely.

“I was a bit anxious walking into a roomful of people,” said Mr. Pearshouse, chatting amid the din created by a table saw, router and lathe at the Camden Town shed, a 700-square-foot workshop in a local community center. “But I immediately thought, ‘Yeah, this is a place that would work for me.’”

Mr. Pearshouse, who had never worked with wood before he discovered the Men’s Shed, showed a visitor a delicate wooden jar he was finishing. The pieces he produces are gratifying, he said, but not nearly as gratifying as the human connections he has made.

While Mr. Pearshouse is still a long way from sharing every little ache and upset with his friends at the shed, he said his life would now feel much emptier without the shoulder-to-shoulder way of confiding he has come to know. As he spoke, he took the lid off his jar, and it gave a slight pop, signifying a perfect fit.

Dying Alone

I am pretty sure that is me.  I am one of the many childless unencumbered individuals who are without many social contacts, a long term job and a connection to a community. 

I died once but for the grace of god I lived.  I realized then that people are largely self involved, unkind and unwilling to help, if you are poor, if you are old, if you are female and of course if you are not white.  I am three out of four so the odds are not in my favor.

I read the article in the New York Times today about the Lonely Death of George Bell.  It is lengthy, tragic and no one ended up happy.  There are no happy endings in lives lived like Mr. Bell or my own………for now.

And as I sat there at my coffee shop the Police arrived to answer a call that a woman found an elderly gentleman on her street sitting wet and confused in the grass.  He was unable to give her the needed information and she did not feel comfortable searching for ID so she brought him to a public place had him wait in her car until the Police came.  I can assure you that that random act of kindness is rare here and that had it not been a largely gentrifying hood with many around on a Sunday he would still be sitting there.  This city is unkind and as the New York Times also wrote about a week ago – we lost our soul in the process of our growth.

She of course when I complimented her said it is something anyone born and raised here would do. I laughed and said no I don’t think so it is not called “random” acts without reason. And she explained about her Judaism and her faith and I understood.  I had nothing to offer her with regards to that and said I am a Catholic who returned to my faith but I still see people as they are and they are not all good.  She did not agree and we ended our discussion abruptly where she left her backpack.  I did not chase after her or touch it.  I wanted to remind her that no, they are just that random.  I can be a bitch but I can be kind.  It just depends.  I am random that way.

A young sixth grader said to me once, “Miss. X you must be really lonely as you don’t have the same job to go to every day, how do you know people and make friends.”  I did not have the heart to tell him the truth and I hate to lie to children so I often say, “I make things up. It shows imagination and creativity, lying is hurtful and destructive.”  And so I made up that I had a life.  It was just another way of saying that if I don’t get out of this place soon I will die here for certain this time certainly alone.

No one helped me. No one.  Ask my attorneys as they will not answer my calls. They did not believe me when I told my story then, they did not help me prove it or offer ways such as court orders  to cell phone providers to prove my dates existence nor ask if I wanted to hire a detective.  They did nothing but take my checks.  I will spend the rest of my life hating them and never foregiving them.

I wrote about another man’s death, in Death by Acronym, that because of the ETOH response by Police, the EMT and the hospital staff he did not get the attention he needed quickly enough to survive the assault that left him injured without ID and ultimately he died. Not from the injury of course that will be the official records, but due to neglect by those in charge of his care.

I could have ended up dead.  I could have made it home and the young man following me finished his business and left me to die.  I would have died like George Bell.

I carry this anger like a seeping wound.  It is like a tumor that grows and I cannot have it surgically removed.  I often think that much of this is gender based and of course aged based but our system is so broken that unless you have an advocate to fight for you, you will die alone.