Pen Pals?

I thought maybe I'd try to find some new pen pals. There is a lot to be said for the rush when you find somebody you click with and I do enjoy writing. A lot of searching on the web has shown me a few things.

First that the sites I used to use years ago, on AOL and Yahoo are no more. Or if they are there I sure can't find them.

The next thing I found is that there didn't seem to be a single good truly free site out there. Most of them were free only if you were willing to accept almost uselessly limits on the services offered. I am more than a bit hesitant to pay for a site since there is no guarantee it's even a good site, that it could produce results.

Another thing I learned is that the process of trying to find a place to find pen pals was stressful and reminded me how stressfull the finding could be. So...maybe I don't want to do this.

For a while I'd dropped totally out of the online scene. I was not checking my email more than a couple of times a month and not looking at Facebook at all. I changed that. My email inbox is empty now and has been staying empty. Yes, I get emails from a few (very few) people. The only people (two) who I want to talk to have, understandably, seemed to move on and have time to write very infrequently, briefly and relatively shallowly. In other words I blew my window of opportunity and have effectively lost all the friends I cared about.

My son wrote on Facebook the other day something about why is it that once you decide to do something it's too late to take advantage of the opportunity. That's how I feel and I know I have no one to blame but myself. Heck, for the most part, nobody even reads blogs any longer that I can tell. At least I can write here and not worry if it's something I should not have written.

I am on the brink of dropping back out of the online scene. It's changed too much from when I started in '97. I just can't compete any more. That avenue of finding new friends for myself appears to be gone and with it the only real chance I ever had since I'll never manage to do it in real life.

At 52 i'm not gonna change who I am or how I feel about some things. I'll never become less shy than I am and so I just have to accept that I'll spend the rest of my life relatively friendless. Why then, should I bother to eat right, go to the doctor and take pills to help lower blood pressure and cholesterol? That would all serve to increase the time I have to spend on an Earth that really doesn't give a flying fuck if I'm here or not. Ok so life is not so bad that I'm gonna kill myself (I wouldn't have the courage anyway) but on the other hand I feel no desire whatsoever to increase my time here on Earth, no reason to. I'm contributing nothing that I can see. Even my wife is learning to live just fine without me down in Orlando.

God, if you're listening I'm ready for whatever you've got in mind next, nothing left for me there that I see.