I’ve been struggling all week. Made it to work every day but most days was late and so had to work late to keep up with the job. I took today as a vacation day because yesterday I just couldn’t force myself out of bed and into work before 10:00. I’m normally there by 07:30.

It’s not depression. Don’t feel sad. I feel exhausted. As if I am a battery that can’t recharge. Why that is…not sure. Could be age or the toll my poor habits have finally taken, or could be that introvert stuff. If I am alone for days, no people’s faces, no talk, just the sounds of trees and wind, the night stalkings of the unseen animals in the undergrowth, then I start to feel less traumatized, less like I am naked in a sand-blasting machine.

I have written elsewhere that I don’t much like people, albeit I am fascinated by the way we are and how we got to be this way. That’s true, I suppose, that I don’t like people. But on days like this, it is not my dislike that is at issue. People are simply hard to be around – wearing. My poor little introvert circuits just get overloaded.

I have a friend who is an extrovert. She has a hard time believing me about the wear and tear people’s presence has on me. It’s not that she thinks I am lying but rather that she can’t imagine it. She asked me once what I would do if something really awful happened to me. Her assumption was that I would immediately reach for family or friends because that is what she does. She finds comfort in the presence of others. When she feels stressed she wants to talk it out with others. I see her do that; she uses me that way. I thought about what she asked, ran through several examples of bad stuff from my past, and if at all possible, what I did was the same. I tried to get somewhere as remote from human contact as possible and after the first crying days, I just sat listening to the sounds the world makes.

Being away from human contact is how I recharge. Unfortunately, being around people isn’t simply neutral to me. It is a drain. Here outside the coffee shop where I am writing this, no one talks to me and that is good. I hide behind my notebook screen and, unless it is a beggar, people read the cue correctly and walk by. This is not too bad. There is minimal drain in a circumstance like this. Still there is the young man behind me who is complaining that he had to throw away his new shampoo because the airline wouldn’t let more than 150ml on the plane. I mean how could he not be aware of that? Where the fuck has he been since 9/11? It’s this kind of thing that does it. Or the man who pulled his car out into the intersection on a red light, got smashed up by the guy who was on his way through the intersection on a green light – and the guy who ran the red got mad and started yelling.

I seem to have no defense against these kinds of stupid behaviours apart from staying away from them. When I ask my extrovert friend about human stupidity she just shrugs, “so what,” she says. She is more mystified by why I think that is a problem than by the stupidity. In a sense she’s right, of course. Expecting human beings to act rationally is rather unrealistic; it is my own stupid thing to do. I have been on a mission for the last couple of decades to break myself of this expectation, but I still get overwhelmed occasionally by the blatant contradiction between our species claim to rational fame and examples of our actual behaviour. How dare we, I think, how dare we claim ourselves as sapiens.

So at root it is a moral issue for me. It was the “how dare we” phrase racketing around in my head that was the clue. So down there somewhere in my psyche is a set of beliefs about what it means to be human that simply isn’t true about who we actually are – about how we behave. Somehow, I came to believe that rationality was a fundamental definitive characteristic of human beings and that our individual behaviours ought to reflect that. Bollocks, of course.

If I just think of human beings as talking apes then I am OK. The expectations meet the actuality seamlessly and no dissonance erupts. But who the fuck wants to be around talking apes all the time? I mean what would such creatures want to talk about? Status, copulation (past and intended), other talking apes’ social misdemeanors, grooming rituals? Right. I mean even when you want to talk with one of them about something like philosophy or science or some other rational (so-called human) pursuit, it is just amazing how fast the talking ape rears up with the standard topics. Just look at some blog on atheism and watch how fast non-atheists start talking about the social misdemeanor of not believing the “authorized” version of reality. Or for that matter, on that imagined atheist blog, when someone asks pointed questions the person or theories of some currently revered model atheist.

No. why would anyone want to spend more time talking with talking apes than one had to? And since humans (you know those rational beings we like to think of ourselves as) don’t actually seem to exist, then what?

OK, so I’m in a bad mood. I’m tired and cranky and struggling with what I expect people to be and do. And of course I am aware of the thinkers among us who make the title “human” seem (if remotely) possible. What I need to do is take an Antonio Demasio book, my camp gear and my car and go hide out for a few days. I could recharge and try again to shatter those beliefs I have that do not accord with how things actually are.

Can’t do that of course at least not for long. I’ll grab a few hours today in between errands and once they are all done, tomorrow – well – tomorrow I think I’ll sneak out really early with a flask of tea, Descartes’ Error and earplugs and go somewhere shady with a bit of a breeze and (hopefully) very few talking apes. My rationale is that if I can’t break the silly beliefs I have, at least I can minimize their impact.