The Alien Nation

Last week I spent a lot of time talking about the things that divide us. Or specifically the way in which Mitt Romney divides us. His is a complicated taxonomy based on bedrock principles of simple math, boiling all of the heat and noise of politics and culture down to the root base of harsh, unyielding, kind-of-dickish economic realism. It's an almost Marxian reductivist position akin to the razor of dialectical materialism, but with less of a clear genealogy of development in German philosophy and more sotto voce racism.

If polls are any indication, for the time being anyway, he's finally found a way to unite Americans in what has been from at least 1994 a deeply and increasingly divided polity, now lock-armed in opposition to the idea of Mitt Romney as president. If that's not leadership, I don't know what is. The only problem now with the 47% number is that it's looking like he well undersold his ability to inspire people to not vote for him. All this and modesty, too.

I'm certain Mitt Romney never looked for this to be the outcome, but often the things that end up actually bringing people together--on whatever scale--are rarely planned. Some of the best conversations I've had with people I work with have happened in the parking lot's designated safety areas during phoned-in bomb threats. Although I guess technically those can't be counted as "unplanned" from the point of view of the person who took the time to phone it in, but for us, it was a bolt of team-building serendipity. Alex from shipping has a new baby grandson. Sue the admin temp has been sober for 90 days now. And Brent from human resources finally had that restraining order come through. None of us were quite able to ask if he was the petitioner or defendant in that particular action, but some things are better left mysteries, for safety's sake. Anyway, enjoy your 500-meter zone of no-contact, Brent. We hope it brings you some much needed peace.

This week at my house, our bonding agent? Bronchitis. Mmm, sometimes nearly drowning in one's own phlegm is a catalyst to deepen the bonds between family members. As a father of three, one-on-one time with any of my kids is a rare occurrence. Usually I'm OK with this because when they're around in numbers, they tend to pick at each other until someone cries or throws a punch. Either way, they generally leave me alone to finish building the virtual addition to house my disco hot tub on The Sims 3.

It was my youngest who was afflicted, so when his two older brothers loped and shuffled off to school in the morning, I found myself face to face with one of my offspring. I was shocked to realize I'd have him without his guard up, without trying to look older than he was in front of his brothers or to seem cool in front of friends or reserved in front of strangers or drunk. This was an opportunity to get a brief, precious glimpse into the solitary life of what I normally consider only as a cog in the machine that is my little half-time family; something to be cherished and mined for all its unquantifiable value. And then he coughed, like right in my face. So it was a one-way conversation about basic hygiene practices and the fundamentals of human consideration, after which I sent him to bed to nap for the rest of the day because "sick time is not vacation time."

It had been a long time since I'd had the opportunity to yell just at him. It felt so much more personal. It was something.

And then there are the things we do deliberately in order to make a connection. Like online dating. Which is, as you've probably heard from everyone not in a television commercial for online dating, a train wreck. Where one of the trains is hauling untreated sewage. And the other is carrying hydrogen bombs. And they both simultaneously crash into a stalled bus carrying blind orphans recently cured of cancer.

So, paradoxically, if you do it long enough, an activity like online dating seems like the least likely of places to make human connections because built into it is its own antithesis. Where online dating falls down is in that it is peopled entirely by humans. This is not a tacit endorsement of bestiality,* just an attempt to point out that on every date, you will have two very flawed people sitting just close enough together to achieve a vibrant, almost Darwinian sense of true mutual disinterest. This is someone with whom I would never mate is so much more evolutionarily profound than it sounds when you're telling your friends later it was because you couldn't tolerate the whistle in her sibilant S's.**

When it works, then, and you take into consideration a) all the people in the world; b) of an age you'd be legally allowed to copulate with; c) not yet of an age beyond your arbitrary delimiter for classifying as "old as fuck"; d) within tolerable driving distance; e) single; f) not related to you; g) of the gender and/or sexual orientation you'd be willing to accept in or near your orifices designated for sex***; h) also on online dating and i) on the EXACT SAME online dating site as you... I don't know if you could count it as a miracle, but statistically speaking, it's what mathematicians call "a fucking reach."

I've already used serendipity once in this post, but I think that's all we can call these things. There's no way to plan or strategize or predict. Everything looking forward always seems windswept and lonely, populated by tumbleweeds and Xanax bottles, with nothing obvious on the horizon to draw us closer to our fellow man. Well, except Bikini Basketball. That seemed too obvious to mention.



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*that would be something, were I to do it, I'd save for an asterisked aside, not the main body of my piece.

**I know apostrophes don't make plurals, but you figure out how to say more than one S and get back to me. I think AP has my back on this one.

***I can say from some experience--which may or may not just mean research--that this is more of a slidey scale than you'd think, depending entirely on how long you've been out there.