The Marvel Loneliness Handbook

The Marvel Comics Loneliness Handbook recommends against becoming part orca, though these whales are gregarious and self-assured, and likely to have picked up a decent load of radiation from Fukushima; their bite is just too much for someone not yet part orca. Now a songbird—hear me out—like the common starling isn’t so dissimilar, marauding in big, playful packs which, not unlike alien spacecraft, change direction and shape all at once, even into that of a whale, as once photographed in Scottish twilight, and you can easily keep one in a cage beside your aged, radiation-leaking microwave, offering an appetizing finger through the bars before sitting down to your Burrito of Solitude and the chemistry set on which you’ll synthesize the creativity-enhancing drug that will make you an adored rock star, or, alas more likely, a modestly renowned writer, illuminating the darkest crevices of the human condition, which the Handbook, however, recommends against, at least until you’ve first synthesized the patience-enhancing drug that will make anyone want to read such fine literature, especially now, with all the flashy alternatives making it their business to thrust our face well enough into the crevices, unless your own strange beam happens on an overlooked glint, which must be the rumored Crystal Cave of the human condition, closed off by rubble you might, with awful effort, hue at until you can squeeze yourself in, and out again, transformed, not unlike that jet fighter on the radar screen that all at once changes direction and shape, into a heart emoji, a bandaged heart, a face with heart eyes, that face blowing a heart kiss, and now fifty twinkling stars as you lead your starling gang home across the majestic, lonesome mountains.