I am one.

And right now, I am a very annoyed one, as the sun is shining RIGHT into my eyes and I am having to duck down like I am afraid of enemy fire in orer to be able to see the screen at all.

That was annoyoing enough when I was trying to play my video game, but now it is interfering with my blogging and thaty is Serious Business.

Or what passes for it in the tiny village that is my life.

That segues into what I really wanted to talk about tonight, which is a question that occurred to me earlier that I thought was well worth exploring :

How would my life be different if I lived in a small town, like the one I’m from.

The gut instinct would be to say small town life is horrible and there is a reason I moved away from the Island and its stifling smallness.

That three weeks around Xmas that I spent back home in Summerside were more than enough to convince me that there was no way I could live there any more.

It felt like everyone, including my family, were sleepwalking. And they had no idea they were doing it. When everyone is moving at the same slow speed and nobody has anything to compare it to and no frame of reference to gauge their speed against, nobody notices that life is very, very slow.

Its like being on a bus with no windows.

Just thinking about it gives me existential claustrophobia. And yet, when you break it down into the pragmatic pieces of my life, things start to break down.

But first, a caveat : this thought experiment assumes that my current set of friends stays with me. How? Dunno.

Don’t argue with the givens.

So what do I actually do in my life? Most of the time I am here at this computer, either using the internet or playing a video game.

Neither of those activities are bound to a particular location. My home town has the internet. I could blog from there and thanks to Steam, I buy all my video games over the internet as well, so there would be no problem there.

What else do I do? I hang out with my friends and watch videos. The videos come from the internet and presumably wherever I lived, I would have living space I could use to play videos and hang with my friends.

I also go out to dinner with my friends. But where do we go? Denny’s and another chain family style restaurant. There’s no unique little bistro I would just DIE without. We could do the exact samel thing back home. I doubt Summerside has a Denny’s, but it has their equivalent in one form or the other.

The only other thing I do is go to therapy and my GP. My home town definitely has GPs, like the family doctor I grew up with, Doctor Saunders.

Individual therapy…. maybe. Probably not once a week, though. My current therapist, Doctor Costin, says individual therapy is going out of style fast. Which is a depressing fucking thought, because the alternative is group therapy and if I was healthy enough for group therapy to work, I wouldn’t need therapy in the first place!

I’m a rather unqiue person and I have massive social issues due to a socially isolated chilhdood, teen years, and pretty much the rest of my life circa now.

Group therapy just makes me feel ignored, misunderstood, and even more isolated.

It’s bad enpough to be lonely, but to be lonely in a crowd is the absolute worst.

So I end up falling naturally into Junior Therapist mode. I ask others about their problems and do my best to facilitate their therapeutic process by asking the kind of questions that aid their catharsis.

And I really enjoy that role. It’s not like when I am in it, I feel like I am forced into a role I hate by my issues.

And I am really good at it. It’s a tragedy, really, that I didn’t stick with school and become a therapist. It’s a job that I enjoy and excel it, and I am positive I would find extremely fulfilling. To help people with their demons would be a beautiful privilege to me.

Maybe it’s not too late.

Now where was I before I activated my own issues… oh right, small town.

So on the practical side, except for a certain iffyness about the availability of individual therapy,. I could have the exact same life I have now in a small town.

Except for one incredibly important and tricky to justify scientifically the : the vibe.

What WAS it in the air that made me feel so out of place when I visited home? How can it be that one place can have such a radically differtent baseline emotional affect from another? What kind of mechanism could possibly exist that does that?

I can only blame pheremones. They have an effect on out minds that is both massive and completely unconcious. There must be instincts hardwired into our nervous systems that tell us how many other monkeys are around and what kind of things they are doing and where our place is relative to those variables.

Makes me wonder if, via experiment, you could expose people from one kind of area to the air from another kind of area and see what effect, if any, it has.

So presumably,  somewhere in the deep electrochemical relays of my being, there is a sense of where I belong and that is a place with a lot of other monkeys doing a lot of different things around me.

Strange considering my social issues, but whatever.

Whatever this strange variable is, it would assure me that I would be miserable living back home in Summerside. Even if my life was otherwise identical.

There uis a reason I felt stifled on PEI and feel juch better here in the big city.

And I would love to know what it is.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.