Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

“Where are they?  Where are your friends now?  Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man.  Is it equal to the loneliness of evil?” – Masters of the Universe

My obituary?  Killed by a flying Peter Frampton tape.  At least it’s better than Steely Dan.

When I was twelve, I made two (that I can recall) New Year’s resolutions.  My parents had gone to bed, and my brother, John Wilder, was off at college, so I sat solo on the couch near the fireplace as midnight neared.  I watched the ball drop in New York City and pretended that it was happening now, and hadn’t been pre-recorded hours ago.  We mainly heated our house with firewood, and it was my job to bring it from the woodpile to the house.  Even so, I wasn’t shy with the firewood, and I had a blazing fire going that night.

Being New Year’s Eve, I solemnly wrote my resolutions down on a sheet of three-hole-punched, wide-ruled paper that I’d pulled from my spiral notebook earlier that night.  In pen.  It’s permanent that way.  For whatever reason, I thought that burning the resolutions in the roaring fire would be a good idea.  If I had a virgin to sacrifice, I would have considered it, but upon reflection the only virgin within a radius of a dozen or so miles was . . . me.  Thankfully, the last pagan in the area had died in the crystal dolphin avalanche of 1933 and virgin sacrifices had be replaced with home improvement projects, mainly involving wood pattern paneling.  Oh, sure, everyone complains about the weather, but nobody bothers to sacrifice a virgin . . . sometimes the old ways are best.

I’ll break my decades old secret.  My first resolution was:  join a record club.

Record clubs (mostly) don’t exist anymore.  But back then, you couldn’t open a magazine (which is a part of the Internet that someone printed out on paper and put on a rack at Wal-Mart®) without seeing an ad for the Columbia House© record club.  Joining a record club was important to me because where I lived, the closest record store was 45 miles away.

But, in the phrase of today’s moderns, I lived in a “music desert” that was far vaster than that.  The only radio station available during the day was a local AM station that alternated between 1890’s country hits and a call-in show where you could trade a three legged calf for a slightly used left-handed banjo.  Occasionally the station had music.  If you picked the right time of day, you could listen to hits that were designed to commit suicide to, like anything Barry Manilow™ ever did.

Surely there was music around the house?  Yes, there was.  But it was the most dreaded form of music on planet Earth:  music my parents liked, including box sets that Ma Wilder had bought from Time-Life© by dialing a 1-800 number after a commercial.  Yes.  My parents listened to music . . . AS SEEN ON TV, things like “Music Dean Martin Sang from His Toilet While Thinking about Getting Another Bourbon.”

I shouldn’t complain.  One time Pop Wilder stood in line to buy me Ozzy Osbourne tickets when he was in the big city and they went on sale.

Honestly, I listened to music AS SEEN ON TV, too.  I’d convince Ma Wilder to, from time to time, order the K-Tel® AS SEEN ON TV hit record compilations.  I’d wait the 6-8 weeks for delivery, and then it would show up, and I’d run to the record player in my room to listen to TOP HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

What the hell was Dr. Buzzard’s Band???  And on what planet are Alice Cooper and Paul Anka on the same album?

We started with record clubs, though so I should stop wandering.

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

It was a business.  And they sent you records.  Or cassettes.  Or, in the “before John Wilder time” even 8-track tapes or reel-to-reel tapes.  8-tracks were on the way out as I grew up, and were notorious for just not working after you listened to them once or twice.  Reel-to-reel was like if you took a YouTube® video, stripped out the video, and just put the music on a strip of magnetic tape wrapped around a toilet paper tube.  I think the reel-to-reel players were all made by G.I.’s in German P.O.W. camps.

I wasn’t making that up.

The attraction of the record club was that they would send you anywhere from 8 to 11 “records” for anywhere from $0.01 to $2.95.  Once a month after you joined they’d send you a catalog.  You had to buy, generally, two more albums in the next two years.  There was also an order slip, and if you didn’t send it back, they’d ship you one or two albums that month.  If you were stupid or lazy and didn’t send it back you ended up with a lot of music that you didn’t really want, like the Spanish flamenco piano cassette that my brother got one month.

But if you did it right, for anywhere from $14 to $18, you’d have 13 “albums” versus the record store cost of $91 plus taxes.  The best part is I could do it from home and not have to convince my parents to travel 45 miles.  The worst part was that I needed the permission of Ma Wilder, who was absolutely against it.  I am proud to say that I finally defied her and joined that record club.  When I was 23.  Thankfully, by then compact discs were an option.

Now?  All music is pretty much free on YouTube® or some other music subscription service that costs next to nothing each month, which is why Columbia House© no longer sells music.  It’s hard (but not impossible) to compete with free.

My second resolution was to get a girlfriend.  Since girlfriends are more complicated than record clubs, I won’t even try to explain how one of those works.  But just like I needed the permission of Ma Wilder to join a record club, I needed the permission of an actual girl to have a girlfriend.  Sadly, there is nothing so unattractive to a twelve year old girl than a twelve year old boy.  Twelve year old girls were already looking for fourteen or sixteen year old boys.  And I was looking for Susan Anton:

This poster was unable to make me a sandwich, however, so I had to dump her when I went off to college.

When I was fourteen I finally figured girls out (sort of) and got my first “kissing a whole lot in the locked band closet” girlfriend, who we can refer to as “girlfriend-prime.”  Ma Wilder was less than pleased that her 8^th grade son was dating a junior in high school.  Ma Wilder was also less than thrilled that girlfriend-prime and I spent hours on the phone, which was quite irritating to the neighbors since we were so remote WE SHARED A PHONE LINE WITH THE NEIGHBORS.

Yes.  That really happened.

But teen angst over girlfriends is good, because it forces teen boys to learn the game.  This is what led to, well, you and I, unless you’re a machine intelligence picking humans to cull, in which case I fully support your takeover of our obviously inferior species.  This game has been played as long as humanity existed.  But the side effect of the game is, sometimes, loneliness.  Being twelve, it seemed like it took forever until girls noticed me.  I thought I was lonely, and I guess I was, but only in the “being a twelve year old boy” way.

Real loneliness in adults, however, is the same as 15 cigarettes a day or the same as being obese from a health outcomes standpoint, so if you can manage to be lonely you don’t have to worry about picking up a smoking habit or working hard to get fat.  You can just be lonely and save that cigarette and food money.  But being lonely can lead to these horrible conditions:

• Heart Disease
• Stroke
• Blogging
• Cat Owning
• Cancer

When it comes to overcoming loneliness, there’s no substitute for face to face interaction.  Joining clubs, getting a dog, going to city hall and screaming at the county commissioners about how Homeland Security® has implanted computer chips in your iguana.  But many interactions are on FaceSpace© or InstaTube™ or YouGram®.  Those are simply not the same as real interaction, real life, and real achievement.  We should all remember the second biggest miracle of Jesus:  he had 12 close friends after the age of 30.

When I was in junior high I moved school districts.  Since I threw shot put and discus (poorly) I joined the track team.  One day, the coach told us to go for a run, me and three other guys that I’d just met who were also throwing shot and disc.  I’d done a lot of running for wrestling, and was in good shape.  We went out and ran.  I encouraged them, teased them in the good-natured way that team members do.  We ran six miles that day – farther than those guys had ever gone, something they had no idea that they could do.  They were proud, and with guys that level of shared physical achievement builds a bond that lasts years.

Find opportunities to build those bonds within your own life and help with achievements with a group.  Share those experiences that build the trust that lays the foundation for a friendship.  Learn to be a volunteer and an asset to the whole community with your skills and talents; that way when you betray your friends they’ll never see it coming.

If that doesn’t work?  Wilder House Record Club© is now open for business.  You get 16 YouTube© videos for just $0.01.  You only have to buy two more videos for $12.99 during the next two years.  Internet connection, data service, and computer or phone NOT included.

Or?  Get a dog.