My commitment to an alternative life-style is not so way off course. It’s not hugely different to convention, just sufficiently so for me not to want to conform. Perhaps one of the particulars of that difference is a capacity and a need for solitude. That is solitude to think, to read, to write, to get bearings on the world and my place in it, to get peace maybe. I don’t think these things are quite so weird or alternative, or at least they shouldn’t be. That such inclinations turn out to be off-beam is probably something of an indictment on the world. That is weird in itself I would say.

However, the danger with solitude is that can you sail perilously close to disconnection, something I don’t like. I’ve always found it easy to fill my life up with people. The speed with which that can happen is curious. A diary full of events has never been hard for me to achieve. Neither is the associated obligation-overload. And usually it turns out to be with all the wrong kinds of people.

Of course that facility to cram the diary might not always remain so easily available to me. There will probably be a time when I think I still have that choice, the choice of filling up my life with others or not, when actually the option will have passed. Who would want to be in my orbit and why? That’s a bit scary. How do you know when that time has come? Maybe it already has.

But fuck all that. At this point, and probably for the duration, I’d rather be in quasi-isolation than have a life full of the wrong folks. I can occupy my mind and keep myself sufficiently entertained alone. It’s not my preference. But it is preferable to being obligated to an endless stream of unsuitable others.