None of my own inner demons have anything directly to do with Nic’s blog post about how nice guys finish last, but the opening quote reminded me of the dead-end lifestyle I’ve been leading for the last decade or so.

Now that I’ve grown delirious with sleep, the thoughts that have spun through my head today have pretty much mellowed out, and I kind of don’t care anymore.

But I can’t help think about the probability that when a woman tells me I’m too nice, it’s just code for you’re too ugly and fat for me.

Whatever. There are more things to life than mere love, companionship, and good sex that you didn’t have to pay for.

I did find myself wallowing in loneliness today. Just a smidge. I’ve been trying to limit how many hours I spend mired in self-pity these days, and the medications help a little bit, so it’s not the big massive emotional sinkhole that it used to be.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why a certain someone never returns my calls.

You know things are bad when you aren’t even in the Friend Zone™ anymore.

It does kind of get me down that the only people who call me and leave voice messages are my mother and the credit card companies who are clamoring for my soul.

No one ever e-mails me anymore, either.

I’m just friendless, freakish, and hopeless.

OK, OK, things are not as bad as I make them out to be.

As most people understand, the name of the game is “you give a little, you get a little.” Ain’t no one gonna come knocking on my door if I don’t at least make some small gesture of welcome.

To put it another way, I can put much of the blame for ending up a hermit squarely on myself.

To paraphrase a former Secretary of War, the only way to make someone trustworthy is trust them, and I’m clearly not going to make any new friends if I expect everyone to betray me eventually.

It’s hard to ignore my motto which serves me incredibly well when I’m at work: “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.”

As Chuck Palahniuk once wrote, “If you worry about disaster all the time, that’s what you’re going to get….”

Ultimately, we end up back at square one. The existential question for the day becomes this: what exactly do I have to offer to anyone? As a friend, as an acquaintance, as an employee. Just as a person in general. For the longest time, I’ve told myself, deep in my heart, that I’ve got a lot to offer, it’s just that there’s this depression and this fear of betrayal that’s always getting in my way.

No matter how sad and pathetic I would be, in the inner sanctum of my soul, I would hang on to the hope that somewhere deep inside this morass of sadness and despair, there was actually a person who was worthwhile, and who would be fun to hang around with.

Well, as time goes by, and as my bad habits harden, I’m starting to give up on this hope. Eventually, what you do becomes who you are, no matter what the philosophers say, and I’m getting to the point where I will become this awful, useless person who does nothing but mope all day, who lacks the most rudimentary of social skills, who trusts absolutely no one, and who will remain friendless for all the rest of my days.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The easy way out is to blame all of this on the malicious actions of people in my past.

But I know better.

The universe didn’t dick me. I dicked myself.

(In the off-chance that maybe one or two of my actual friends are reading this, none of this diatribe applies to you. I know that you’re busy, and that you’re not ignoring me, and I know that if I wasn’t such a lazy and thoughtless bastard, I could just give you a call maybe once in a while instead of whining about how no one ever calls me. But you know me, always looking at the dark side of life, and never the one to do anything about it.)