Offense and defense

   A couple of weeks ago, I was in Trader Joe's on Masonic Avenue doing my weekly shopping, quite contented that it was emptier than normal. I had felt pretty confident before going there that it would be so, as the Golden Gate Warriors basketball team were in the playoffs, and most of San Francisco seemed quite invested in the team's plight. I had heard a report on the news a few evenings before that for one of the earlier games, eighty percent of televisions in the San Francisco bay area had been tuned in. Mine was not one of them.
   The idea that so much enthusiam was as focused as it was on a sports team, although satisfying for me at that particular moment, was also concerning; it reminded me how banal I often find people's interests, how 'group think' seems so prevalent in so much of the world, and also, I imagine, that I could not share in that excitement due to my own beliefs and prejudices.
   It's often hard for me to tease out whether I avoid considering myself a part of large groups because of a lack of shared pursuit, or for fear of being rejected, but the satisfaction that I must receive from feeling a bit superior to people in my interests doesn't near the sadness of feeling so apart from them.
   Back to the Trader Joe's experience,  after I had finished doing my shopping, I got online to pay. When my turn came, I began bagging my items as they were being tallied by the cashier, and decided to talk with him. Sometimes, I reach out to people in this way as a way to combat my tendency to isolate myself, despite feeling apprehension at doing so. I thought I'd share with him my thoughts regarding the lack of a crowd there.
   "I wish the warriors were in the playoffs every night" I said, or something like it, and told the young man that I didn't care for crowds or sports very much.
   "Me neither", he said, and I became somewhat excited that my attempt to feel related had paid off.
   I asked him what he was interested in, thinking that perhaps we had something in common, and he began to tell me that he spent most of his free time making suits of armor, sometimes spending a lot of money on very expensive materials. I believe he said they were high tensile steels.
   I don't know if my facial expression changed noticeably, but I felt great disappointment that my experiment had apparently failed. I felt at that moment that I should have just kept to myself, that I would have felt more related to a basketball fan than this person at that moment. In hindsight, this man's enthusiasm for his hobby, which was somewhat out of the ordinary, should have given me hope, but there at the checkout counter, I was disillusioned.
   As I think about it now, I imagine that this kind of disappointment is what keeps me so defended in the first place.