Isolation

By now, I am sure many of you are familiar with the shootings that took place at the L.A. Fitness outside of Pittsburgh. If not, hit pause on this blog and go to any news site and search for it. Ok. Unpause.

I heard about this while at my job when the news guy came in to start his day and mentioned it in passing. While waiting for stuff to happen so I could perform one of my insanely interesting tasks at work, I went to one of these electronic news sites to read about it. When I read about it, the story was about 12 hours old so the police were still trying to establish a motive. I knew there had to be some twist to it and I was sure that it would be revealed in due time.

Turns out the guy was balls crazy. Who saw that coming? Right?

In one of the first instances I can recollect, a mass murderer chronicled his thought process into a journal of the future, aka a blog. I read this blog (linked off of a news website, so track it down as well to keep up with me here) a few nights ago. It was genuinely chilling, horrifying, and fascinating all at the same time. Here is the plot:

- Man hasn't had sex in over a decade. Man hasn't had a "real relationship" in roughly 3 decades. Man thinks that the problem must obviously be women and not his insane parental/fraternal issues, his self-defeating/self-fulfilling pessimistic properties, and his skewed view on what happiness is supposed to be. Man wants to die and take others with him because his life is so unbearable.

What has prompted me to feel so passionate about this tragedy is the utter stupidity and selfishness of the perpetrator. The stars aligned and placed an article right next to this headline on the New York Times website that I read it off of. The article reported on the rising trend of male rape in the Congo as perpetrated by militants to act as a symbol of disrespect/degradation to the town they happen to be brutalizing. So, in the grand cosmic tragedy that is this fucking planet, we have a man who is so fucking stupid and unhappy that he takes the cowards way out as well as killing some innocent people....yet, I could hazard, has not once been raped by an angry man with a gun solely for the purpose of humiliation.

This fucking planet.

So now we come to the meat of this post.

If you read the blog, you get a sense of how much of a failure this man thought he was. And, in your travels, you have probably met a much, much, much less exaggerated kind of person similar to him: someone who feels that their life is only validated by other people and/or how many times their genitals played an away game. They believe that they are truly isolated from the rest of humanity and are, therefore, worth less as well as losing some invisible race.

I guess I should lay my cards out on the table: I am a moderately "Ok"-looking twenty-something white male with "Level 3 game." I have had my share of relationships and romantic encounters. On the other side of the coin, I have also been single in all meanings of the word for long stretches of time as well. I have seen both sides of the spectrum.

I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but in the U.S., it seems that we are force fed the sentiment: "Look at these hot chicks! You should be having sex with hot chicks all the time! Don't be single or else you're a fucking gross loser! Be happy through sex and through someone that hangs around you that has the yin to your yang, genital-wise, and they don't think you're horrid! Be happy! Happy Valentines Day!"

This kind of shit breeds crazies like this murdering tard and less crazy versions of him. Mopey losers who are losers because they think they are losers. We, as a society, think that it is our end result to end up constantly happy in a happy relationship with "the One." Things don't always work like that.

We feel this need to always be wanted. We think 0ther people will fix our lonliness; our isolation. It has been a life lesson of mine that you need to be happy with yourself first; you need to be happy on your own. That is attractive: self confidence. Do you really think someone will come near you as you're screaming: "fix me! love me and fix me or I will cease to exist! No pressure...but fix me! Be my everything!"

That is fucking horrifying.

Here's another take: being single isn't bad. In fact, sometimes it's awesome. I know this dude was an extreme case but I'm sure there were people who went longer than him. But I digress. How can being single be awesome? Well here is a list:

Being single:
-Who do you spend your money on? You.
-What are you going to do tonight? Anything you fucking want to.
-How many times a week are you going to have a talk about feelings? 0 to 0.0215 times.
-How much free time will you have? All.
-Would you have time to throw yourself into constructive things: music, art, reading, exercise, etc? Fucking probably because luckily you live in a fucking country where you are free to pursue what makes you happy and do what the fucking shit you want to do, up to and including sob-sterbating in a kiddie pool full of baconnaise because of how fucking tragically lonely your life is.

What I'm trying to say is: the problem MIGHT (just fucking maybe) be you. Maybe you have put yourself in some kind of warped self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Change your bad traits or be OK with being single or take a step back and put some perspective in your life.

At least you aren't being raped by an angry man with a gun just to prove a point.



- J. Michael Hill