Lonely heart leads
to desperate acts
Keith Ludwick
reporter

 During my eight-year-marriage, I would never look twice at a horoscope. I always said horoscopes were nothing more than anecdotes for the superstitious and unimaginative.
Does loneliness equate with a mental illness? Or does one simply perpetuate the other?
Yet as I currently find myself alone, I read the horoscopes every single day. In fact, I read the daily fortune even before I read the daily headlines. I then spend more than a few minutes trying to decipher the magic that must reside in the words.
What is worse, these messages are no more accurate today than they were eight years ago.
As if that weren’t enough, I also find myself reading the fortunes that come with Chinese food before I eat the rice or even set a plate on the table.
Humans are social animals. I honestly think we are somehow in a state of abnormality when we have no one sharing our lives with us.
Then comes the depression as we search for our perfect partners only to realize perfection doesn’t exist and no one can measure up to that first love.
So we become desperate. We latch on to the first thing that comes along even though we know that the person we have settled with is wrong for us on entirely too many levels.
Rebounds rarely end amicably.
Yet rebound we do, again and again.
We put ourselves out there. We go to bars even though we know that bars are perhaps one of the worst places to meet a potential companion.
I think the only place worse to meet up with someone special would be in the state-run correctional institutions.
And no, Diane Zamora—convicted along with her boyfriend of murdering a young woman—has never returned my letters. I can only hope.
Then we become bold in our insanity. We go online and look at the Internet personals.
Finally, in a moment of extreme desperation, we do the unthinkable: we respond to the personals that do not include a photo.
Insanity. Loneliness. Depression.
In my way of thinking, they are all one and the same.
Perhaps tomorrow’s horoscope will hold the key.
If not, there is always that psychic hotline thing.