This kept me from going to college, even though I had the highest aptitudes of anyone in my class. No money for college and nobody in the family who could coach me how to get the money, and an apathetic school administration meant I joined the Navy for 'free' school, a paycheck and clothes.

I work alone because working with other people always seems to be a one-way ticket to their dependency on my skills.

I do make some effort to keep a friendship going, but I find few who make the same effort in return unless they want some help.

Friends are people I fix things for. Sometimes they pay me. It's not reciprocal.

"There's just a kind of blindness to the world of other people outside my head." I sense the reverse of this: other people have a blindness to my world. I'm invisible unless something in their world demands my attention. I lived in a place for 17 years, and when I was selling my farm equipment, neighbors who lived a mile away thought I had only lived there for a couple of years. Modern social media exacerbates the problem if you don't have the time for it.

You could live next door or on the other side of the planet and have the same relationships with only time zone differences keeping the distances in play.

Thank you for the perspective story. Always enjoyable.