Exit West

After traveling for weeks to promote books and research future books, I arrived home with laryngitis and a firm grasp of how to handle myself in the emergency exit row of any airplane. I’ve been going so much and spending so much time in various airports that I when I got off the plane in Sacramento I wasn’t sure exactly where I was. This is exactly the reason I didn’t want to continue doing standup comedy. I didn’t like being on the road so often. It’s lonely. Nothing is as romantic as you think it’s going to be. Of course that’s not an original notion. Pioneers lured west had the same thought. What those poor souls didn’t realize…. The West was haunted by loneliness and its twin sister, despair. One aspect of the frontier has been dodged persistently to satisfy the vagaries of folk drama: the isolation and loneliness of families who lived there. There was no place lonelier than the frontier. The legal proviso that a homesteader stay on his claim – often extending for miles around – practically excluded human contacts. There was nowhere to go, no one to see; no casual visitors, no passers-by. The prairie itself, a bleak flat expanse unrelieved by so much as a single tree, emphasized the settlers’ sense of physical separation from the human community. Winter intensified their isolation, shutting them indoors for long periods and leaving them without even the meager comfort that the sight of another living creature might bring. The separation from neighbors and relatives was especially distressing; adding to the bleakness was the absence of an occasional social event that would involve some happy commotion. There were only dismal evenings, the endless drudgery and the restless behavior of cooped-up children, who were often prevented by bad weather from making the long trek to school. Frontier life was most depressing on those who by nature were gregarious. The sense of abandonment was most keenly felt by homesteaders who came from small European villages, where social gatherings and folk dances were a tradition, where life was hard but not lonesome. This sense of abandonment drove many settlers insane. I feel like that so often. But I’m home now…still lonely but surrounded by my own things and familiar with all the emergency exits. That’s something anyway.