Lonely Just Looking
Twenty-two years ago I wrote a book, not necessarily about anything, called Lonely Just Looking. Not about anything except maybe what it’s like to be twenty-five and not know what you are doing with your life, feeling all the while like you are missing out and everyone else seems to have it made, whatever it is, whatever is the thing in 1999, the dawn of the cell phone age. I wanted to write the kind of book where you could open at any page and read, and it didn’t matter what happened before because the words were like a painting and the letters like flashes of color, capturing an image, a moment in time that was maybe related to the last moment, but maybe not.
I shopped the book around for a bit, even presented different parts to my MFA Program. I had no luck on the publishing side and my fellows in the MFA said it was too cliché. One guy said I just needed to get laid and then I would write something meaningful. I get it, there’s this whole sense of driving around gawking at glamorous girls, but it’s more than that too. For me, it’s the language, the hard “k” in gawking followed by the “l’s” and of course the alliteration in all those “g’s”. I can’t help that I love certain letters and craft whole sentences based on that. I suppose I should have had more stuff like, the handsome hunk, looking so hot in his hummer, so much bigger than all the rest, honks incessantly as if to hurry the light to change, but it won’t change, not even God himself can heave such force, and all the while, the beautiful belles basking in the sun, breaking all the hearts except the lucky one, if there is one, and it’s not me.
On a whim, because I wanted to feel like I was making an effort, I put the book up as an e-book on Amazon. This was in March of 2015. I should have proofread it, but I didn’t because I was terrible at finding those little mistakes in my work. As well, I didn’t want to read only to conclude it was too horrible or not good enough, then do nothing because that was too easy, and sometimes, so much of life is more doing nothing than something.
If you ever wonder about that proverbial tree in the forest, if it falls when no one is around, if it really falls, or if it even exists… Well, I didn’t tell anyone about this book, which I published under a pen name. And as you would expect, people don’t magically find something. If you looked on Amazon even now, it would be hard to find, and not because of the pen name (i.e. D B Hagedorn). As such, I was the first person to purchase the other day, load into my kindle app and spend the next day or so reading.
In college, I had a few professors who championed my work, made me believe I was capable and allowed me the illusion necessary to write. After college, I didn’t have that, which made things difficult at times, and discouraged me so much that after a certain point, I stopped writing as much. My work always kind of embarrassed me anyway, like it’s me and not me. On some level, I felt I was flawed because of the way I looked and felt about things. I knew medications didn’t help much, in fact, they changed who you were in the process of supposedly helping you. What was needed instead, was something like code, something like a network to champion your cause and advance you along so that ultimately you could find the good life.
In the piece, I try to create a sense of exile from the world, that while I exist surrounded by beautiful things, I am there but not there, almost invisible to the world of pretty girls because my warehouse eyes can’t fill what my heart seeks. It’s like the Counting Crows song “Mr Jones” except she’s not looking at you and she’s not looking at me, we’re just sitting at the bar trying to love, but feeling like we are unlovable, and more than that, irredeemable too.
I couldn’t write this today. I could look back and write something, but it would be a lot different, have more structure and less spontaneity, which is not to say I would call this piece stream of consciousness, rather stream of experience, or better yet, stream of life writing because I was writing in the moment, as I lived it, trying my best to capture a period of time, a summer in 1999 when I felt like the world was impossible and it was so lonely, so lonely just looking.