Friday night ironies

Well, it’s Friday night and I decided to stay home.
Of course, this is no different.

No different than the other, what, 50 or so Fridays each year. I’m always home on Friday night.
Therein lies my trickery of human expression and suggestibility. Curious, isn’t it?

For I made a simple and neutral statement: “It’s Friday, I decided to stay home.”
The sentence has no overt intention other than to declare an indisputable fact. I decided to stay home this fine Friday evening.

Ah, keeping in mind the sentient party-animals that we are thus born and raised, we likewise tend to atribute and endow observations and statements with surreptitious symbolisms and inferred meanings. We fill in the blanks.

My statement, “it’s Friday, I decided to stay home” is suddenly inflated and hoisted above our metaphysical shoulders and the assumption is that I chose to stay home tonight as opposed to going out; I chose to stay here. The inference is plainly obvious, for it’s a common perception (and even a desire) that a single man, will not, under normal circumstances, choose to stay home on a Friday night. It’s the penultimate expression of “life” or whatever the hell is in keeping with the sacrament of single-living Friday night splendor. And my statement, while superficially innocuous, is subtly distorted into a mirrored counter-assumption that by choosing to stay in, I am in fact departing from a routine (which is left unsaid) in which I go out on Fridays. Even though that is not the case!

“It’s Friday, I decided to stay home.”
The missing piece of the puzzle, the mysterious piece that you don’t consider until it’s spelled out for you because you are so enshrouded in the all-consuming mentality that Friday night obligates one, within the context of normal human social drives, to exit the house in search of booze and women, or barring that degree of wildness, at least a movie and popcorn, maybe dinner….the missing piece that I left out is:
“As I always choose to do on Friday nights.”

Ya see!?

This broadens the concept and lets sneak in the unanticipated revelation that I have no life.
My simple statement, worded so ambiguously that it captivated and deluded normal perception and interpretation, really was just the tip of the iceberg that is my stunted social life. The iceberg which lurks coldly beneath the water’s calm surface.

So I decided to stay in tonight after going out to eat dinner, that is. I went to a popular area Mexican restaurant (of course, there is not much else in my neck of the woods). In this part of L.A., you either got Mexican or you got Chinese. There is a smattering of other foods, but your choice essentially will be sandwiched between the wildly divergent selections of eggrolls or taquitos.

So I ate my dinner alone at a small table in the bar of a crowded Mexican restaurant. If you choose to eat alone, especially on a Friday night, you better have a courageous ego or you risk awkward self-consciousness. I know a couple of people who refuse to do anything alone. They will not eat out alone, will not see a movie alone. I can’t relate. Not when I choose to do as much as possible while alone. I can’t comprehend this urge to surround oneself with people at all times (or rather, I can’t understand the abhorrence certain people have of the state of aloneness). So I sat at the table and observed, because that is what I am…The Observer. I study human nature and I feel most placid when I am able to witness the madness of human interaction from a displaced distance, close enough to engage the aura but far enough to avoid its capture. While sitting in a restaurant with the after-work coed bustle of dinner happenings buzzing along, you note one thing: people talk a lot. Talk and talk and talk and talk. Talk with no end. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting to listen, much less participate. Many times after I leave work, my lips and jaws are drained from the day’s verbal demands and I literally can’t bring myself to open my lips to utter more than a few lazy utterances in the evening. Picking up the phone can be excruciating.

The option is to get rid of it.

Hmmm, that’s an enticing thought.
Actually, the idea of throwing my cell phone down the sewer drain is both exciting and frightening. The possibility is invigorating but intimidating. We’ve become attached to our cellphones, even if we don’t use them. We have become attached to them in the way we are attached to an appendage, a body part that is retained merely for the sake of false biological impetus, like an appendix. I’m speaking for myself, of course. I realize there are many whose lives revolve around the phone…mine doesn’t. I might find it pleasing to live a phoneless life. I’ve forgotten my phone at home a few times and there is something ascetically appealing in the empty-pocketed sensation of phonelessness and the promise of day long silence, and the knowledge that there is no possibility this quiet flow will be interrupted by the persistent invocation of my cell phone. Not to mention, that’s an extra 40 or 50 dollars each month I’d be saving. It’s tempting but there is always the “emergency” unknown. This world we live in…the promise of life or death, skirting the edge of disaster, gravitates around us all day long. Our phones have become a lifeline. I find it peculiar that our mentality has shifted thus far toward the acceptance of cell phones as savior, as rescuer and security blanket. Much of my life overlapped those recent eras in which we happily existed in the absence of the cell phone teat…if you needed to make a call or thought there was a chance you might, you carried extra change because pay phones were plentiful, however disgustingly sticky and slimy they may have been. Without the cell phone, life is less sure, less controlled, more vast. Unexpected nooks and crannies await in the unseen darkness of existence.

It’s tempting.