-"I"solation

The smell smacks one in the nose just inside the automatic door, and everyone in the great room shares in the bounty. Without a work-out, it would be uncomfortably cold at the YMCA, but our activity warms it up nice and sweaty for us all. With thin towels and wall dispensers pumping anti-bacterial gel, we swipe and daub at the smells and threats lurking in our quests.@

Staring at an individual enhanced-definition# screen and sweating into the foam of my headset's earpieces, I was one of many, chuffing out carbon dioxide, all in a line, held in place by a mini-screen.$ I didn't hear Sheryl, but saw her signal me in peripheral vision. She rode an elliptical machine, while I worked a treadmill. She mouthed a channel number to me, pointing at her screen.

Thumbing the channel changer, I arrived at a local broadcast of Robert Putnam from the stage of the Sun Trust Auditorium of the Orlando Museum of Art. We figured out later that this had been an event we'd actually attended--a friend from a local non-profit invited us to hear the author of Bowling Alone. The camera panned the audience during the Q&A session. I caught no glimpse of us listening, attending the words. Admittedly, the soundtrack of the event did not pull me away from the sounds from my mp3 player.%

Sound in my ears, smell in my nose, 73 channels to choose from and the thoughts in my head all fought for attention, having very little common ground to share it. Pumping away at speed 4.1 (6.0 is a mile in ten minutes) at an incline 0f 4.0, my legs kept me in place at my TV.^ Hovering unnaturally, I wouldn't hear Putnam's words again, fearing they would sting.

On first hearing him as he spoke to the capacity crowd, his ideas and truths didn't seem discouraging or unwelcome. My daily life bristled with the people and interaction of an office work life. I understood what he said about the loss of community and "social capital" in post-WWII America. He was talking about a familiar world, the one in which I'd grown up, a life lived in the great between and nowhere of car travel commutation and TV screen transfixion.& It's our now.

At this time in my life, if not for Sheryl, I could spend whole days in a row speaking to no one but my self and my bird. During a trip she took recently, I did just that. I scanned my own groceries at the store, my asocial entertainment in the form of a DVD arrived in the mail, the woman at the Y's check-in desk swiped my card while talking on the phone, I replied to a couple of e-mails, and my phone was not dialed and did not ring. My motion through the world was brisk, my transactions efficient, and my mouth closed.*

Eight months away from the world of work has pinched and narrowed my life, my window on the world. Right now, that window is as small as a TV screen, as the page of a book, and I suppose as big as the windshield of a car. My wallet affiliates me with the town library and the YMCA. Each brings me back to myself--words on the page, pictures in a screen, and me, huffing away at nothing like a hamster-wheel man.

None of this would bother me so much if not for the side effects. That's the part of Putnam's message that hurts. Where do we "belong"? If the answers to that question include only places, where we work or sleep or shop, rather than groups with whom we create, commiserate and laugh, well, something is wrong, isn't it? How's this for stinging: "Joining one group cuts in half your odds of dying next year."+

I'm not sure how to end this, or if there is an ending.


@Think of sweeps-week local news exposes of flesh-rotting bacteria lurking on hand grips and medicine balls, the lingering middle school fear of sweat stink--I spent an entire 13-year-old day sniffing my armpits at school, horrified at my failure to apply deodorant that morning, and can't shake the creepy-crawly feeling that comes over me as I do sit ups on the mat.

#I don't know if enhanced definition is better or not than high definition, but it has the effect of greatly enhancing the age visible in the faces and necks of the screened subjects. I find myself reaching to my adam's apple and the space below my chin at those moments, as if I could catch myself aging or push back the sag of time at the skin of my neck.

$It is sort of silly and pathetic that we do this and rather than generating energy, consume it in the process of combatting our sedentary ways. I imagine the weight-lifters hurling tires or bales of hay, the stationary bikers delivering packages. Is there no way to convert this expenditure of energy to good use? If we are going to make workhorses of ourselves, why not put all that energy back into the grid? The gym could sell it to the power company, and adjust membership fees according to the power each of us generates. It would be interesting to see what such a scheme did for the adult obesity rates in this country. Imagine making money, even, by exercising!

%I was listening to songs by the Monkees, Ken Nordine, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, Buzzcocks and to a book by David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster , a book of essays read by the author, was available at the library so I ripped it to iTunes. The iPod was programmed to play at random, and bits of the text, out of sequence, played amidst the music. Would it be postmodern of me to say that the meaning of the essay was not damaged, was perhaps enhanced, by this disjointed presentation?

^A pleasant though unnatural feeling of floating happens for me each time I step off the treadmill and begin walking to the fountain after my 30 minute trek. All of a sudden, the perceptions of forward motion and walking synch up again, making for a momentary all-is-right-again-with-the-world feeling that is brief and magical for me.

&Trance-Fiction--as this sound-alike occurred to me, these words from the Beatles' "Glass Onion" went through my head: "talking 'bout the fool on the hill, don't you know he's living there still". Go ahead, I dare you: Try to think of exactly just one thing, whatever you choose.)

*It may seem strange to you, but there was nothing particularly lonely about this time. The days were full with necessary activities, and those that I invented. I even wore my mp3 player into the grocery store and shopped with my essays and music. It would not have changed my interaction with the world, or lack thereof, had I removed the headphones. When I think back to my childhood, to the first edge of my rememberable life , it seems a silent, disembodied world, just my set of eyes looking out.

+Am I alone-ing myself to death, or do I just have a much lower need for interaction with the world? Somtimes it feels as though I have trained myself to be okay with solitude. I get uncomfortable with near-friends, squirrelly about phone calls, invites and meetings. Friend-behavior is not something I am practiced at, and I am no longer sure that I can handle the trappings of voluntary association, or that I want to. This new world of terror and threat levels means danger in public--explosions on trains, pat-downs at stadiums, dirty bombs, road-rage, viral fears, identity theft, black-outs, AIDS, pollution and panic.