The Third Lonliest Number

Multiply this by about thirty. Then remove clothes and add video camera.

Dear Murky Fringe:

I recently read your post entitled “If One Is the Loneliest Number You’ll Ever Do, and Two … Is the Loneliest Number Since The Number One, What is the Third Loneliest Number?” Which post, I realize, was at least partly rhetorical (and which was certainly the longest post title I’ve personally ever seen).

That said, I have an answer for you, based upon my own hard-won experience as an adult film star.

As Harry Nilsson says, one is the loneliest number. Me personally? I will generally do anything not to be alone. Anything. Because there’s just too much time to think when you’re alone. A terrifying, self-injurious amount of time to think.

And I agree also that two can be as bad as one. Yourself and one other are just not enough people generally. That’s why there are clubs. And after hours parties. It’s not that they’re fun, particularly, it’s just that the alternatives are so very much worse.

But in answer to the question you put forth in your (really almost shocking the length of its title, a monster title, a horse-hung title) post, which question you then answer in the tongue-in-cheek fashion I’ve come to expect of your site, the answer is not “three,” as you cleverly posit. Having performed multiple scenes with two or more men and/or women, I can say that there is a level of connection (albeit disassociatively, a collection of limbs and orifices rather than whole people, which is a real comfort) the three-to-ten way that belies your (admittedly probably meant humorously) suggestion. No.

In my experience, two hundred is the third loneliest number you’ll ever do.

It seems counter-intuitive, I know. How could having two hundred men lavishing attention on you, showering you with approbation, leave you feeling so incredibly alone and empty and devoid of life or hope or any sense of self worth?

So lonely, as it were.

I don’t know. But that’s my experience.

Tagged as: showered with approbation, Three (Hundred) Dog Night, two hundred is the loneliest number you'll ever do