It's 3 in the morning and there are two people sitting on my couch, but they're both sort of asleep. At least they're in recumbent poses with their eyes closed, whether they're technically asleep or not isn't relevant. One of them has to be up in two hours for work, and since I'm the only one still up I guess it's up to me to make sure he's awake then, since to be late for this particular job would be a very bad thing. So here I am, forced to silently sit here looking at sleeping people for the next two hours.

My experiment in sociability is officially over as of now. Tomorrow it's back to my normal hermit life. There are too many variables, it makes me feel guilty and inadequate when everyone isn't having an absolutely wonderful time, and what I get out of this is questionable anyway. Plus I begin to hate the sound of my own voice, filling in the awkward silences with inane chitchat. Mostly it's that I'm not doing my normal things, causing me to feel a kind of humming low level anxiety.

Tonight we watched Eraserhead, a movie I have a long history with. Eraserhead is in many ways about certain kinds of anxiety, pervasive but subterranean. Sexual anxiety, fear of responsibility, a definite horror of reproduction. It's also about a particular kind of grinding urban loneliness. This is the loneliness felt in the company of enormous hibernating machines and waiting at the far end of long empty corridors, in dark little rooms with hissing radiators beneath windows from which can be viewed shadowy street crimes in progress several floors below. I knew nothing about such loneliness when I first saw Eraserhead but I sure do now. These days, however, my loneliness is of a more prosaic flavor, and I want some of it back.