Our Girl Next Door

News of her move to Shady Glen spread like a virus.

It must be the realtors who start these rumors. They find out first and can’t resist the opportunity to elevate their status by dropping a celebrity’s name. Then those who hear the name can’t resist the opportunity to tell their neighbors who their new neighbor will be. Then we let it slip casually to outsiders, in passing, as if news of a new celebrity in our midst is just an everyday occurrence behind the gates. By the end of the day, everyone within a fifteen mile radius is infected with the knowledge.

Sometimes the rumors prove untrue, such as that time my neighbor assured me Neil Diamond had bought the house down the street. I learned to play “Cracklin’ Rosie” on my guitar, thinking I’d strum it in my backyard so he’d hear it and mosey on over and next thing you know I’m hanging with Neil and traveling in his entourage and swimming in a sea of middle-aged groupies. Then a mortgage broker moved in.

This time, the rumors proved true, if the caption writers at People magazine can be believed. A page torn from a recent issue was passed around, neighbor to neighbor, Exhibit A in the rumor’s defense. There she was, playing on her front lawn with her kids, captured from a distance at an oblique angle in a blurry photo that still left no doubt it was her. It kinda looked like the front yard of the house she supposedly bought, but any doubts were erased by the caption which began: “In front of her new Shady Glen home….”

People’s reactions were interesting.

At first there was excitement: Another celebrity chose our community! And People magazine noticed! Celebrity validation – the peace of mind we get when a celebrity endorses us by doing what we do – is the most powerful force in our society. And when the connection between a celebrity and Shady Glen is announced to the world by no less an authority than People magazine, we can die happy, certain there can be nothing left to accomplish in our lives.

The excitement gave way to concern for our newest celebrity, now one of us, practically part of the family, as we considered the paparazzi who haunt her every move, eager to capture an image to peddle to those celebrity rags. The photo looks like it was taken from across the street, or maybe from atop the hill with a telephoto lens, leading us to unsettling visions of interlopers sneaking through our underbrush and lying in wait while waiting for their chance to steal her privacy. How horrible for her! And her children! Let’s not forget the children.

But what about us? Sure, we may benefit greatly from our association with a celebrity, but that benefit comes with a significant cost: When they stake her out, those camera-toting dark-clad figures will sneak around our neighborhood, trample our flowers, litter our trails and urinate behind our sheds. Our concern for her has now shifted to a concern for us, and the collateral damage her presence will inflict on our peace and quiet. Not to mention our privacy.

But Shady Glen is gated, we recall. How exactly are these paparazzi going to get past the guards? We breathe a sigh of relief, our peace and quiet and privacy protected after all.

Well then, how did that guy get in, we think, looking at her picture. It’s unlikely he could sneak in. It’s unlikely one of us took the shot and sold it to People. So one of us must have called the photographer in. But who would do that?

And then it dawns on us. Of course! She must have arranged it. Or, more accurately, she must have had her publicist arrange it. Can there be a more effective affirmation of one’s celebrity status than a photo in our nation’s leading chronicler of celebrity culture? Especially when the photo is a “candid” shot that conveys a modest and becoming reluctance to achieve the very fame conferred by the photo, the elusive image she projects so publicly only enhancing our desire for her. If that photo can put Shady Glen on the map through validation by association, imagine all it must do for her.

So if the uninvited are invited, they won’t have to skulk around, fouling our yards while concealed behind our hedges waiting hours for an unguarded moment. Crisis averted!

Now if we can just figure out a way to get her house into InStyle.

Tightly-Knit Tribal Mind

“Man is a social animal.”

You hear that all the time. But what does it mean? I think it’s just a polite way of saying humans are high-order herd animals, our massive brains hardwired to bind us as close as possible to each other by rewarding us with pleasure as we socialize ourselves and punishing us with pain as we isolate ourselves.

It all makes a lot of sense, this social animal stuff. Who was more likely to survive and propagate – ancient humans driven by their natures to live in tightly-knit tribal units that effectively leveraged the comparative advantages of each of its members for the benefit of all, or ancient humans driven by their natures to wander off alone and do everything by themselves?

So we inherited the tightly-knit tribal minds.

Even me. Sure, I value solitude more than most, but my head is filled with basically the same standard-issue tightly-knit tribal mind that fills your head, and pretty much everyone else’s head who isn’t a total sociopath. It punishes me when I stray too far from the group, rewards me when I return.

This is how I explain my high school friends.

It all started 25 years ago, the beginning of our first year at high school, as the kids all split up into affinity groups, and within those groups into friendships, and I was standing on the sideline watching this game of musical chairs and getting this increasingly urgent sense from my tightly-knit tribal mind that I had to do something before the music stopped, so at the last minute I glanced around and glommed onto a ragtag group of social rejects much like myself, united in our inability to unite with anyone else, and that became my affinity group throughout high school.

It was better than nothing, I suppose, but it came at a cost. In order to maintain my membership in good standing, I actually had to do stuff with the group. If they wanted to see Ernest Gets a Hangnail or Porky’s XVII, I had to bite my tongue and fork over the cash and write off another two hours of my life. If they wanted to spend a weekend camping in a dust bowl in the middle of a boiling hot desert, I had to grin and bear it. If they wanted to spend a Friday night loitering in a dimly-lit parking lot debating what to do while bouncing an old golf ball around, I had to stand by alongside them. You know, the usual friend stuff.

If it sounds like I was a passive hanger-on, that’s because I usually was. Sometimes I suggested alternate outings, but I was usually voted down, and sometimes I refused to participate in an ill-considered venture, but I couldn’t make that a policy or I’d never do anything with them. Let’s face it: I had no choice. They were the only friends I had, so my tightly-knit tribal mind wouldn’t let me leave them.

Throughout high school, my relationship remained with the group, not with any individuals in the group. I never formed particularly close friendships with any of them. So when the group did stuff, the group included me. But when individual group members did stuff, they usually did not include me. I can’t really complain: when I did stuff, I never called any of them. You could say our relationship was one of mutual distance and diffidence.

After high school I left for college and made enough friends that my tightly-knit tribal mind allowed me to delete the group from my life. It would’ve happened anyways, I think, what with my relationship being only with the group as a whole and the impossibility (in the days before email) of dealing with the group as a whole from 2,000 miles away.

I figured I’d never see them again, but I returned home a few years after college and ran into one of them in a store and before I knew it I was sitting in a movie theater watching another crappy movie with the group.

What happened? I certainly wasn’t pining to be in their presence again. My best guess is that my tightly-knit tribal mind pushed me into it. I’d left my college friends behind and had few prospects of making new friends and my tightly-knit tribal mind couldn’t let me dangle any longer in this unaffiliated state.

So I slipped back into the group. It was as if I’d never left. I think my failure to connect with any of the members actually helped, for I didn’t sever any personal ties or hurt any feelings when I disappeared after high school.

Over the next few years I finished school, got a job, met my wife, moved to a different community, had kids and cocooned. I drifted away from the group again, but didn’t leave, still seeing them for weddings and the occasional backyard barbecue. I no longer needed to watch crappy movies on Friday nights or bounce a golf ball around a deserted parking lot in order to feed my tightly-knit tribal mind.

Or so I thought.

Recently, surveying some adverse developments in my head, I realized that my life had become increasingly isolated: no group affiliations, few friends, pretty much keeping to myself and starving the social receptors in my tightly-knit tribal mind. Is it any wonder my tightly-knit tribal mind rebelled, punishing me with such intense pain? “Feed me!,” it screamed.

It isn’t easy to reconnect with friends you’ve neglected, and it’s even harder to find new friends, especially when you feel like you’re being forced into it. A significant part of me still prefers to be alone, pain be damned. But just as I eat my vegetables, walk my daily mile and slather on sunscreen because they’re good for me, I keep an eye open for friendship opportunities because I know they’re good for me too.

So when I learned the other day that my high school group’s last singleton was getting married, my reflexive groan at the thought of an interminable night ducking the crowds in a windowless hotel banquet room quickly yielded to a grim steely-eyed determination to make the most of this rare opportunity to reconnect with the old group. At my age, how many more chances will I get? I’m determined not to blow it.

Sadly, my reconnection efforts aren’t going smoothly. Years of social isolation caused key parts of my tightly-knit tribal mind to atrophy so much that my self-centered side is now dominant and, as you’d expect, unwilling to share any of its power. So though my intentions are good, I’m constantly beset by obstacles, self-inflicted and otherwise. Individually, none of these obstacles are that troubling or unusual, but taken together they may scuttle my nascent diplomatic efforts.

I think the only way to explain this is to present three examples of the sorts of dilemmas I face on a daily basis as I attempt to reconnect.

Dilemma 1: The Toxic Tux

He asked me to be an usher. An unexpected honor, a promotion from my usual job of seat-filler at these weddings. Usually I’m fine with a reduced role, but on a few occasions I’ve been the only member of the group not in the wedding party. Even I see that as a dis, especially when it means I get stuck at the miscellaneous table with the other social misfits.

I agreed to serve as an usher on one condition: I get to wear my own tuxedo. Generally, I’m as flexible as the next guy, but when it comes to those ill-fitting polyester monstrosities with the lacquered black corpse shoes they peddle at those tuxedo rental shops, I draw the line.

He was taken aback, as if I was a Yankee who wouldn’t wear pinstripes.

Others strongly urged to abandon my position. Some in the group were offended; what was good enough for them clearly wasn’t good enough for the likes of me. Others pointed out that the day is about him, not me, and that we all dress alike in order to show our solidarity with the groom while not distracting from him and his lovely bride. “What kind of weird friend are you,” my wife asked, and I had to admit that maybe she was onto something, though still I refused to back down and eventually he caved.

Dilemma 2: Wenches and Stenches

Then the best man announced that the bachelor party would be a weekend in Las Vegas, a sequel, he promised, to the blow-out Vegas bachelor party he organized fifteen years ago when we were young pups. I remember that weekend: coerced tequila shots, in-room stripper, strip-club strippers, numerous propositions to women we saw on the street and in the casinos that they too become strippers. Dawn revealed ten alcohol-drenched and vomit-caked bodies passed out in a suite with windows that wouldn’t open, wallets empty, cigars still smoldering and our heads throbbing from protruding ice picks (at least that’s how the hangover felt).

And the stench. I cannot forget the stench. Mere words cannot do it justice; you could feel it swirling about the room, a physical presence, permeating everything and everyone, so strong it knocked grown men to their knees, so persistent it resisted the most determined shower. Something in the vomit, we concluded. But whose vomit?

You may be surprised to learn that I do not yearn to repeat that weekend. Having done it once, I see no reason to do it again. On my lifetime list, I’ve checked off the out-of-control near-death crimes-involving-moral-turpitude category of bachelor party experience. I’m done.

Apparently they aren’t. And, what’s worse, the plan calls for everyone to share one suite, just like last time, recreating the very conditions that led to the stench.

To go or not to go? I had to mull this one over. On the one hand, my tightly-knit tribal mind recognized it as a bonding experience and pushed me to go. On the other hand, the stench. Three seconds later I decided I wasn’t going.

I invented an excuse and ran it by my wife, as I’d need her to confirm that yes, that weekend I really was having open scrotum testicular surgery that cannot be postponed and would you like me describe it, but she refused to join my little conspiracy. In fact, she threatened to rat me out: “It’s his wedding. They’re all going. Some are flying across the country for this. What kind of friend skips the bachelor party because he doesn’t like the room?” I patiently walked her through each of the weekend’s descending levels of brain cell-destroying (and marriage-killing) debauchery, but her resolve only hardened. “If I can put up with losing you to strippers for a weekend, you can certainly put up with looking at them!” Hard to argue with that.

Then again, there is the stench. Time for Plan B: I’ll be there, but with my own room. And I’m not telling them, so when things start to spiral out of control, I’ll just offer to head down the hall for more ice then beat a retreat to my secret lair. Later I’ll tell them I got busted by hotel security, spent the night in the pokey, where the hell were you guys, just leaving me there like that. It’ll elevate my status and spread some guilt. Perfect.

Dilemma 3: Ban the Kids

Wedding week sure will be busy, what with the couples shower, the rehearsal dinner, the morning wedding ceremony, the evening reception, the late night after-party and the next morning’s brunch.

Of course, we have to attend each of these functions. Even I know that. (Well, maybe we can skip the brunch and cut out early from the after-party, but otherwise we’re committed.) It goes without saying, as my tightly-knit tribal mind keeps reminding me.

There’s just one little problem: Printed at the bottom of each invitation, and repeated on each reply card, is the following gentle, but firm, admonishment: “Please, no children.”

Well it’s a little late for that – we’ve already had kids. In fact, we still have them, we expect to keep them and, for the next ten years or so Child Protective Services expects us to take care of them.

So we’ll need a babysitter for at least 40 hours that week. It’s hard enough to find one for four hours, let alone 40, so I’m not sure what the happy couple expects us to do. I suppose we could stash the kids in the car with the windows cracked, or lock them in an empty room with a box of Cheerios, a bucket of fruit punch and a porta-potty in the corner, or freeze them in a state of suspended animation for the week, but would Child Protective Services approve? I don’t think so.

And I need my kids to be there. They’re crutches for this social cripple. Without them to occupy me, it will be obvious that I have no one to talk to.

The more I think of the kid ban, the angrier I get. What kind of twisted kid-hating soul would ban the fruits of marriage from a wedding? Since when did weddings, the ultimate celebration of family, ban families? Are we going to a wedding or a night club?

My first idea was to smuggle the kids into the wedding, pretending we didn’t know they were banned. My wife then offered to stay home with the kids while I attended the wedding and all wedding-related functions alone. Unable to bear the thought of 40 hours of wedding and wedding-related functions without any of my human shields, I am now desperately trying to convert her to a wedding boycott. “If you stay home with the kids, you’ll just be letting them and their kid-hating ways win. If we all stay home, that’ll show them.”

She shares my anger, so I might actually win this one. Which will only give my tightly-knit tribal mind, or what’s left of it, yet another reason to resume kicking me in the head.

The List

It’s the email list from hell. Day after day, it torments me.

It started years ago when I signed up for Shady Glen’s Daddy & Me group by giving one of the dads my email address. We’d just moved in, I thought it was a nice way to meet other dads, maybe for my kids to meet other kids, and my wife thought it was a nice way to get us out of the house.

The dads would meet at a different house on Sunday mornings, once or twice a month, and the emails would tell us when and where to go.

It was a nice way to meet other dads, but I can’t say any became friends. Some people are friendly, attracted to other people. Others are charismatic, attracting other people. I am neither. Wood in a world of magnets.

And it didn’t help that the Daddy & Me was dominated by a core coterie of close friends. Their tight little clique was highly selective, culling only the coolest candidates from each month’s newcomers, leaving the rest of us to wander about aimlessly, shadowing our kids, pretending to be fascinated by the sand toys while we tried to ignore the huddled mass chatting away and ignoring us.

Over time, the clique grew stronger, strengthened by infusions of cool, while the rejects dropped out and off the list, discouraged by the clique’s constant inattention.

Except me. I wanted to drop out, but my wife wouldn’t let me. When we moved into Shady Glen, I had promised her that I’d do my part to help our family insinuate its way into Shady Glen’s tight little community, forging those communal bonds so crucial to social acceptance. I had thought “my part” would entail my avoiding people, something I’m very good at, clearing the way for my charismatic wife and adorable kids to exert their magnetic charms on the locals. My wife thought differently. If anything, the more I complained about the dominance of the clique, the more she pushed me out the door those Sunday mornings, our social acceptance now hinging on a Quixotic quest to crack my way into the clique.

So I stayed on the list, and the emails kept coming, dreaded harbingers casting a dark shadow over my weekends. I tried to adjust; I’d play with my kids until they found other kids and ditched me, then I’d wander about the yard, surveying its landscape, looking for nooks and crannies in which I could hide. Tucked safely away from the clique, it would’ve been nice to read a book or meander through the Sunday newspaper, but I couldn’t bring a book – it just wasn’t done, and would’ve tipped off my wife to my covertly antisocial behavior – and none of the dads seemed to get the paper.

After a while I figured out that I could download public domain books from the internet into my Blackberry, so I’d sit there, hidden away and hunched over my Blackberry, scrolling through the classics. And if anyone found me, I’d hold the Blackberry, which doubled as a cell phone, up to my ear and pretend I’d wandered away from the group not to avoid it, but merely to take a call. I was a busy man attending to pressing business, not a pathetic loner.

(You may wonder why I cared what they thought, and so did I. It’s a particularly painful conundrum, my need to avoid people while craving their acceptance. But that’s a story for another day.)

Thus I haunted the Daddy & Me, my wraithlike presence rumored but never proven, until about a year later when the emails stopped. At first I assumed the clique had belatedly realized its error and deleted me from the list (“Who the hell is that guy?”), but it turned out instead that many of the kids had grown too old for Daddy & Me and refused to go, leaving the dads without a sanctioned excuse to shoot the breeze on Sunday mornings. So they put an end to it.

And there my tale would have ended too, but for the list.

Soon after, I was working away in my office when an email popped up on my screen: “Vegas! This weekend! Hard Rock! Stag! BYOBabe!” It was from a guy in the clique, and scanning the addresses, it looked like he’d sent the email to everyone on the Daddy & Me list, a list that by then had been winnowed down to the clique and me.

I could’ve replied to all, asking them to remove me from the list, but somehow that seemed unduly churlish, an open declaration of my anti-sociability, so I just deleted it and went back to work.

Emails started pouring in. Let’s play basketball this Saturday! Let’s meet after the game for a party at Rob’s! Who’s up for Friday morning mountain biking? Where is tomorrow’s wine tasting? And each email spawned numerous follow-up emails as plans were changed and details were set and trash was talked. I never responded, still, in a sense, hiding in the foliage.

Thus began a new level of torment, the list sprinkling my days with visions of the good life I wasn’t living. Chained to my desk, I’d picture them riding their bikes on a mountain trail, shooting baskets at the park, watching the game on Scott's new plasma, getting 18 holes in before noon, doing Tequila shots at that dive bar, reserving a restaurant's back room, and I’d wonder where I went wrong. I’d marvel at their freedom, the sort enjoyed only by those lucky few with money and time.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. No, what makes the list almost unbearable is that it reveals, and won’t let me forget, the stark contrast between these healthy social lives, filled with friends, fellowship and camaraderie, and my own life.

I tell myself I don’t need these guys. I tell myself their life is not for me. I tell myself I’d rather be reading, or thinking, than wasting my life with them. I tell myself I have chosen my solitude. I tell myself a lot of things, but as the list sends another friend-filled email into my inbox, I can’t stop this gnawing sense that I’m missing out on something really fundamental.

Man is, after all, a social animal. And the list won’t let me forget it.