and that’s worth something. when you think about it. that’s worth some money.

this is the view I'm talking about. I'm not shitting you people, it was nice.

People are always asking everyone within earshot if they would do anything differently if they could go back.  A better question might be what wouldn’t they do differently.  A shorter list.  Because let’s face it, Paul Simon said it best because he’s who I’m listening to right now, “This is a lonely life/Sorrows everywhere you turn/Summer skies stars are falling all along the injured coast.” What a great line that last is, and how cliché the first two.  Is there anything more pat than the assertion that life is lonely?

Uncle Michael and Me. My ears still look like that. Like someone folded them down until they stayed that way.

Lately, I’ve been looking at my Uncle Michael’s Facebook page.  That’s how everyone calls him, as though Uncle were his real first name. He died years before Facebook was even an algorithm on a window in The Social Network, but my mom made this page for him so his friends could post photos and thoughts.  I guess it was his birthday.  I never knew it since he died when I was four, but I can tell from the page that I would have liked him.   I keep looking at the page. I’m not sure why, maybe because there’s nothing more lonely than a dead man’s Facebook page.  And sometimes, especially when we are moving or breaking up or starting a new job, it feels good to be reminded about lonely.  To steel yourself against lonely.  So this is lonely.  It’s not so bad.  I can DO lonely.  I can do lonely all by myself.

There’s something about my parents being on Facebook that just makes my heart ache.   Like watching a child grow-up.  You think they’re too good for the world until they’re not.  It would be like if my parents hung out in bars with electronic jukeboxes that only play Rihanna.  They were too good for the world, and then there they were, right next to me.  That’s how I feel about my parents on Facebook.

So, that’s what I was doing four days before moving to the East Coast.  Lamenting Facebook and reminding myself of lonely.  This isn’t so much talking about what you wouldn’t change, as it is talking about change in general.  If there’s anything more lonely than changing I don’t know what that thing is.  Changing is like having a misunderstanding with yourself.  And crying is like misunderstanding what your eyes are for.

But change can be short-term loneliness for long-term-less-loneliness.  Like moving to San Francisco 2.78 years ago.  One change I would not change.  When I arrived I was newly single and still smarting, coming off a summer of working in a fish bus and laying on the grass in Laurel Park staring at the too blue sky until things weren’t so much real as realistic.  I had a horrible haircut.  I had only realized like 5 minutes before that writing was the only thing I had ever really liked.  I was coming from a house that had probably the most beautiful view I will ever rent – the ferries puttering up to Alaska and everyday blown up by a ragged orange sunset over the bay.

So what does this mean for you and me?  That life is a succession of breakups and relocations, until you stop breaking up and stay somewhere?  Or that at some point you settle into the lonely so that no one can give it to you or take it away, and then no matter where you go there you are – finally, irrevocably, fantastically, alone.