Mr. Lonely

This year marked the seventh annual Montclair Film Festival in Montclair, New Jersey, and it just wrapped up yesterday.  Movies starring Rachel Weisz and Claire Danes were screened - Rachel Weisz herself appeared to talk about her latest movie with Montclair's currently most famous resident, Stephen Colbert - and there were several documentaries and indie films as well.

And I didn't see a single one of them.

This was the first Montclair Film Festival that I didn't attend.  I might have been able to find a movie I like, maybe two, but the only place I could find a brochure was online, in PDF form.  I don't have the patience to thumb through a 164-page brochure online.  I would have preferred to get it in print, but I couldn't find a print copy anywhere.  And when I did learn of an interesting movie that looked like it was worth seeing, there was always a reason not to go. I found a documentary on rocker Joan Jett that looked good, but it suddenly seemed ridiculous to spend fourteen dollars on a non-fiction film about a rock star I'm only a casual fan of and whose records I don't own.  I didn't even bother to look what was playing on weeknights, because I was always busy with something else.

I ended up watching movies on video that everyone else saw four months earlier . . . and the person I watched them with kept rewinding and pausing the videos - in other words, the exact opposite of the experience of seeing them in the theater - for one reason or another.  I used to go to the movies with a friend, but my friend moved away recently.

This hasn't been a great year for me.  In addition to personal issues, I don't get to hang out with friends that much or go to events like the Montclair Film Festival.  I missed a screening of another movie last month, a movie I actually helped on as a crew member, because it was screened only once, and at an inconvenient place and time.  I skipped the annual Beatles convention for the second time in a row this year for the same reason.  This past weekend there was a miniature music festival in Montclair I'd forgotten about, and I stumbled onto it while riding on my bicycle. There were several performers lined up for it, but the act playing at the time I was there was a rap quartet.

I biked out of there like a bat of hell.

I'm going to have to get used to spending less time looking for fun in the public realm and resign myself to the fact that my free time is limited to being alone and being lonely - riding on my bicycle, reading, listening to my CDs, or wasting time on Facebook to connect with people I can't see in real life.  Also, tending to my stamp collection.  I belong to a stamp club that I don't go to meetings of because I normally work on the days it meets and it recently moved its meetings to a building that's out of my way to work.  Until it moved there, it met in a place I could stop at on the way to work, and I could at least put in  an appearance at the meetings.  No more.

And my old Meetup groups broke up.  Both of them.  One of them was a dinner group in which I was the only male.  Being in the company of women may seem like a dream come true, but it was obvious that the women only wanted each other's company.  I'm still glad I went to the dinners.  Both of them.  Needless to say, I haven't been in contact with anyone in either group.  We all just drifted apart, I guess . . .

So what am I left with?  Not much.  I'm lonely, period.  I have to concede that I am not a part of any crowd.  I don't have the worldliness or the income to hobnob with people who can afford to go to a film festival that screens a Rachel Weisz movie and is attended by Rachel Weisz herself.  I certainly don't have the worldliness to live in a town that would have such a film festival.  I'll come out and say it - I have no social life, and I ought to stop pretending that I do.  When we're children, we pretend - we play make-believe games, little skits for our own amusement.  I'm too old to pretend that I'm a part of anything.

Sorry to bum you all.  Why I am going on about my personal hangups?  Because I'd rather do that than talk about Donald Trump.