Princely Ghetto

I love watching interviews with Mariah Carey. The woman has no idea how to act like a normal human being in today’s society and it’s just hilarious. The woman actually said, in an interview, “Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”

Arrested development at its finest. I mean, at first blush, you want to condemn her of course, and as well you should. It’s a stupid, ridiculously ignorant thing to say and shows a complete lack of compassion and understanding for the human race. But the thing is…I’m starting to understand it in an odd sort of way. Celebrities are so insulated from the rest of the world and so stupidly isolated that how would they really KNOW what it’s really like out there unless they live it, sort of?

Okay, okay, they shouldn’t be making fun of skinny starving children in third world countries, but I get the isolation part, and if you’re intellectually challenged AND isolated, I totally get how this happens. You live the hyperbole, the parallel reality, the different world that you create for yourself and not the one that’s really out there, and if you have no contact with the outside world, how would you KNOW?

Living here is kind of like that for us, minus the ignorance about starving Ethiopians. We’re isolated down here and after a while, you lose your sense of reality. I haven’t had a normal conversation – I mean an actual, normal conversation with a real, live person – in a really long time and it’s just fucking creepy. I’m living a strange sort of celebrity life – not in the pampering, exciting kind of way, but in the isolating, you’re-not-sure-what-reality-is -and- isn’t sense. My relationships – the ones that matter – have almost exclusively taken place on the phone or via email for almost a year. While that’s been awesome to talk to people and to catch up, the daily grind is really bizarre, especially when sometimes it can feel like most of the people I interact with are either over 80 or spend their weekends setting their ill-chosen pet iguanas free in the woods or shooting squirrels in their backyard. And worse, that’s my paradigm for how everyone everywhere lives and I am starting to forget that it’s not that way for most people.

Help me. It’s been almost a year.

Anyway, I don’t think I realized what that does to me until I started thinking about that girl who kept asking me to go camping and realized: she’s been here two years. Oh my God. I’ve never been a super-social person (I like small groups with intimacy vs. giant nights out with everyone), but truthfully, I’m starting to wonder what I would do if I were presented with an actual, normal social situation and I’m starting to think I would act a lot like she did, because desperation and withdrawal does funny things to a person’s psyche.

I’m coming undone. It’s been that long. I have one friend down here – a man who is over 75 and volunteers with me. I adore him and love talking to him, but let’s read that again: My only friend is a man over 75. Other than that, the most meaningful relationship I have is with Edith at a local organization who calls me at work once a week to tell me what’s new. Last week she hung up the phone with, “Love you! LOVE YOU!” and I actually replied hesitantly, “Um, love you too!” and then promptly died. **

See? It’s a matter of time before I start pontificating about starving Africans and whether buffalo wings are made of real live buffalo. I’ve lost my mind almost completely and it’s scary. I still have standards. I still know what my real friends are like, and what I’m looking for, but as time passes, I’m starting to understand that girl who wanted to go camping with monkeys on some strange river up north after meeting me for five minutes. I’m reasonably intelligent. I have all my own teeth.

In other words, I’m a catch. But no, she’s not my type and I hate saying that, and I hate myself for thinking it because yes: I’m losing my mind, and how bad could it be? But I know it would get worse if we were friends, because we’d lose our minds together and would be unstoppable and then I would have NO REALITY CHECK and I’d bring her to family holidays and all hell would break loose because she’d be trying to make my family into vegetarians and insist that we all fly to Beirut together for fun and oh God, no. No, I do not think I will call her ever again for sure. But see? Do you see any semblance of a coherent mind in that last sentence? I’m seriously terrified of the next time I am in a social situation. I might attack my companions. Sit in their lap. Kiss them. Tell them how much I love them, even if it’s the first date and offer to rub their feet.

And honestly, now I’m sitting here in my underwear that are ripped to the point that they actually don’t have a crotch and I don’t know why I haven’ t thrown them away, much less PUT THEM ON, hair standing on end, a glass of wine on the bedside table and a kelly green t-shirt that says “Tuesday” even though it’s pretty much Friday.

Reality. It’s out the window.

*Her husband had just died and I didn’t want to insult her. Give me a break. And yes, Lawyerish, I thought of you as I wrote this. When you mentioned it the other day, I wasn’t sure how to properly explain that yes, I’ve already DONE THAT and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but still. I told Edith at the VFW that I loved her.

** Kay Hanley

17 comments July 13th, 2006