LOST TOUCH

It has become increasingly clear to me over the past few years that don’t seem to be someone with whom it is easy to remain in communication with. In recent times, in a vain effort to try and embrace the hypercommunicatory times we live in, I have begun various exchanges of email with various parties from my dim and their distant past only for these exchanges to fizzle out and fade into a kind of hollow emptiness shortly afterwards. Strangely enough, they always seem to end with me sending one of my strange and no doubt utterly despicable emails and it then not being replied to, which tends to trigger the most impressive displays of paranoia as my brain cartwheels and loops through the many and varied possibilities as to why this might be.

Using Occam’s razor – that the simplest solution is usually the most likely – I should merely assume that people are generally too busy to indulge in such frippery, and that might well the way I should go when it comes assumptions about these matters, but instead, I will convince myself that I have committed some massive gaffe that I probably considered to be light-hearted whimsy but which read like a manifesto from the “Evil Doings” party when seen in cold, hard type. How I put myself through hoops thinking about what it might have been that I wrote that was so offensive or horror-inducing, questioning every phrase for hidden meanings, slight or the simple misplaced crassness that was probably what led to us having lost touch in the first place.

I will mull it over and fret about it all for a ridiculously long time afterwards when it becomes increasingly obvious that the amount of time since that last optimistic “ping” has increased beyond what might be considered ‘normal’ in such matters. “Should I have said that?”, “Could this have been misinterpreted?” “I’m such an ass!” and so on, spinning around in an ever whirling spiral of question and counter-question until I realise that I’ve probably managed to make someone else detest and loathe me and I decide to get on with my life, albeit still more diminished (however slightly) than previously and bearing an unfortunate additional sense of loss, and even there there are still always those pesky regrets to deal with too.

Regrets…

I’ve had a lot,

In point of fact,

Too many to mention…

The truth is that in theory I genuinely regret having lost touch with anyone, but in terms of the practical, day-to-day, managing of those relationships, it was always me that failed to stoke the embers and keep them burning. Sometimes a series of unfortunate events just gets in the way. About half a decade or more ago, I was “reunited” with a “friend” via a website whose name escapes me now, and I got an email telling me how great life was over in San Diego or somewhere, and I think that I replied, or at least I was going to do so when my dear old iMac had a catastrophic breakdown which was ultimately deemed to be irrepairable by whatever chap I sent it to for examination. With it, in those “pre-cloud” days went all my email contacts, and I lost touch with many acquaintances with whom that was my only remaining link, and with no real way to salvage that data, it seemed that they were gone forever.

I did try to light a tiny little beacon of hope over in the complicated world of FizzBok, but many of them have never sought little old me out again, and I can hardly blame them as I rarely go there myself any more. Not that I’d probably respond if such requests arrived in single numbers anyway, because, as you know, keeping that contact list at a nice even number is much more important than adding to it.

I’m sure you’ll understand…

The really odd thing about the tragic little tale I just told you, though (Ah! There are so many ways in which it could be considered “tragic”…) was that it took me six years – SIX… WHOLE… YEARS… - to remember that I had once received that email from San Diego (or wherever) and think about doing something about it. I suspect by then it was far too late, but, in my own defence, I did eventually try.

Once upon another time, I was doing an Amazon book search and coincidentally another long-lost acquaintance popped up as the author of an academic book which I wasn’t planning on buying, although, via the author biography I was able to find out where they were working nowadays and actually managed to find an email address to write to them “out of the blue”, which I hope doesn’t come across as being just a tiny bit “stalkerish”, because it wasn’t (honest!). That exchange was nice while it lasted, but fizzled out very quickly when I suspect it became obvious that we had nothing much left in common any more. Equally, I met an old work colleague a few months back and we sent each other a few messages but that kind of stopped too. I sometimes wonder if it’s my sudden bursts of enthusiasm that frightens people away? I do have a habit, probably born out of the residual guilt about those six lost years, of replying pretty much instantaneously whenever I get one of these messages which is probably quite intimidating if you’re on the other end of that particular electronic see-saw.

Sometimes I do fail to respond to things. I sometimes just forget. More than once I’ve had messages via FizzBok which I think I replied to, only to find that I didn’t. I just meant to. Equally, sometimes I just reply in the “wrong” place. I’ve been known to reply to people via the comments section here instead of through the more personal channels available to me. A couple of years ago I actually got a hand written proper letter through the post from another long-lost pal after I heard that he had suffered a personal tragedy and had dropped him a line or two of sympathy. In the modern world, getting such a well crafted and thoughtful reply was like getting one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets, and yet, like an idiot, I chose to reply to that via email. I’m sometimes such a buffoon. I really need to remind myself that, on occasion, the right thing to do should also be the appropriate thing.

Then, of course, there is the other, usually more fatal factor; sometimes I’m generally just a bit poor at doing such things. For example, as I left my previous employment, many promises were made to some of my former colleagues that I would “keep in touch” but I haven’t. Not really. People I used to chat to every single day I may now hear from once a year, but it still surprises me even now that, with anyone you’ve ever been that close to and you are still “able” to talk to, you can very quickly pick up the chat is if you’ve never been away, no matter how many years may have intervened. There is always that slightly horrific prospect of that eternal worry, the enormous “unknown” that cripples me socially, the probability of “unknown changes” in people’s circumstances to be contended with, but I can usually get beyond those without dropping too many clangers. Meanwhile, I never really know just how other people seem to find these things so very simple when it still resembles an enormous minefield to me.

Still, there’s always hope. Sometimes out of the blue, contact will be re-established, and it’s always very pleasant when it is, although all those promises to “keep in touch” and “we must do this more often” usually come to nothing when I’m in any way involved, it’s nice that people will keep on trying. I am currently feeling rather guilty at having dropped out of my my end of my recent very enjoyable series of email exchanges with a much appreciated pal who I met on holiday last year. Just because his world has become infinitely more busy lately is no excuse for me not to have continued with our exchanges as before, and I do regret that and will have to do something to rectify it soon.

I can’t let that gap stretch to six years…

Still, I know what this is really all about, of course. Fear. Sometime I get so frightened of doing the “wrong” thing that it’s just easier to do nothing at all. I don’t know whether that’s unusual or whether everyone else worries about things in much the same way. Certainly all those highly confident young things that constantly harangue me from my television don’t seem to suffer from such doubts, so I do begin to suspect that I do, after all, have a “unique selling point”, just not one that is of much use to anyone else.

Mind you, this same process of mulling over my own long list of doubts and frettings is mimicked whenever things of a statistical nature grind to a halt in the blogworld, too. There is always the possibility that I’m just too tedious and boring to be continued to be bothered with, of course, but for the sake of my own well-being I have to dismiss that. I do however sometimes wonder whether it’s any of the more radical thought across here in Lesser Blogfordshire that has so appalled one or other of my acquaintances to make them think me no longer worthy of their attention, until I realise, of course, that so few people actually venture into this neck of the woods that it is very unlikely indeed that they would have done.

Is there anybody out there…?