I Googled “How to live alone.”   I figure I could use the help. I got more hits than I expected. Apparently, this is a bigger problem than I thought. One site suggests several things that will “shift your attitude so that you can attract the people and events into your life that you’ve always wanted.”   For example, they say you should ask yourself everyday, “what do I want?” I’m writing this in my underwear at 10am, already drunk, with about 200 empty beer bottles, monuments of my recent bender, cluttering up my one room apartment. So I ask myself, “What do I want?” I don’t really have an answer, but I’m supposed to make a list. So I try.

            1. I want to listen to “Thunder Road.”  

            That was easy. The CD has been in my player for two months. It has yet to attract the people or events into my life that I want.   So I move on to the next suggestion. I am to explore my passions. Drink beer, listen to Springsteen, not put on clothes. Check. I’m next to redefine my purpose in life. I think about this one for a while.   This is the sort of thing my wife used to define for me. I think about calling her, but I don’t. I move on instead.

            “Have a career that feeds you enough money for your lifestyle.”   I have thirty beers in the fridge. I have "Thunder Road" in the CD player. I’m in my underwear. I have money for my lifestyle, at least for now, but not the people and events in my life I’ve always wanted.   The next suggestion is to exercise.   I think about my cousin Ricky who at 22, having always been unlucky with women, fell in love with a very beautiful girl. She loved him as well. She lived in a trailer park, like many of us at the time, and when her mom got offered a job in Minnesota she left with her. Ricky was to follow her after he saved the money to get them their own place.   He was working at Wal-Mart at the time and managed to save up about three thousand dollars in the seven months.

            Ricky loved Wrestling. He had all the stuff—the official Von Erich Family World Class Championship Wrestling board game, coffee mugs, several lucha masks, the dolls. My brother once moved his dolls around into a sexual position. I think Savage and Greg "the Hammer Valentine" were doing the sixty-nine. Ricky broke my brother’s nose. Anyway, what he didn’t have was the 1994, wide body WWF Royal Rumble pinball machine.   This was in the days before eBay, so it wasn’t easy to find one.   There were two in St. Louis though, going for about 1300 each. Ricky figured he could buy one and still have the money to get started in Minnesota.

            Ricky’s dad took him to the city in his truck and Ricky bought the machine. He asked his dad, don’t you think it might be a good idea to tie this down. His father assured him it would be all right. It wasn’t.   They were nearly home, in Deslodge, MO, I think when they took a left at the main stoplight and the pinball machine, Lex Luger and all, fell out of the truck and shattered.   Ricky bought his second pinball machine that day. His girlfriend broke up with him.

            This reminds me that exercising isn’t going to bring people or events into my life. It’s a stupid suggestion, so I ignore it. But the next one sounds promising: Keep your thoughts in a positive place.   Ricky, you beautiful bastard, I think.