I wonder if you're lonesome tonight
You know someone said that the worlds a stage
And each must play a part
Fate had me playing in love you as my sweet heart

Act one was when we met I loved you at first glance
You read your line so cleverly and never missed a cue
Then came act two you seemed to change and you acted strange
And why I've never known

Honey you lied when you said you loved me
And I had no cause to doubt you
But I'd rather go on hearing your lies
Than go on living without you

Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there
With emptiness all around
And if you wont come back to me
Then make them bring the curtain down

- Elvis Presley

Everyone has a day job; whether they want to admit it or not.  There are these people that we play all day long in the world’s strangest one act play.  And I find myself constantly trying to peer behind the curtain.

Friday nights pan out, for me at least, as an ode to the week past.  It serves as a momentary closure to something going fast, and a precursor to something rapidly approaching.  We had driven down to the corner of hip and right now in Silverlake to meet a few of Jack’s friends for dinner.  The group consisted of the token gay duo, and a party of six teachers.  These women, by day wearing capes and tiaras, leading the youth of today along their paths to the adults of tomorrow.  There were art teachers and Spanish teachers and everything in between.  And while the conversation at times did touch on their days as teachers, the rest of the evening played out like an episode of Sex and the City.  Striped bear of their titles, surrounding me were twenty-something women with more than twenty or so modern problems.  From heart triumphs to heart breaks, the gang was all there. 

It got me thinking about what is was like to be eight years old, and looking up to these almost god-like creatures that guided us through the thick and thin of long division.  From my eyes, teachers were always these boxy ladies who hoarded cats and had an affinity for papier-mâché.  They knew their way around a glue gun, and could praise Pollack style macaroni art.  But who were these women that were so firmly imprinted in my mind?  With their floral dresses circa 1994, did they secretly change in the bathroom into a sexy tank top and hit the town?  Were these supposed aged women really only 24?  I had this revelation somewhere between the 3^rd glass of wine and the appetizer platter. There we were, talking about the delicacies of fellatio, and it all felt so natural.  All attractive women, careening through the thick of it; all of them regular people. 

Outside of our capes and our day jobs, we are surprisingly regular people with regular people problems.  And that is usually fairly obvious to the naked eye.  It is the desire to be regular is what creates the sense of drama to these plays we are acting out.  And it begs the question:  are our day jobs, or our time spent beyond the stage, the performance of a lifetime?

On New Year’s Day, I spent the better part of the morning reading through various posts about resolutions and dreams of the people around me.  The type of optimism that is naked, and honest.  And for the first time, I began to feel a little old.  Now granted, I am well aware that I am far from old; still shockingly young at times.  But the resolutions I were reading were from people who had finally begun to live a little, and were now reflecting on perhaps their own shortcomings.  And to be able to squarely stare at yourself and honestly examine your faults is something that only happens with time. 

 Time is so important; vital even.  It is what separates us from late to on-time.  It gives us something to anticipate, and gives us time to heal.  It stares at us from its perch with a mesmerizing march into our immediate future; with notes as if to sing quiet hymns about our past.  

Once all the pages are torn out of your nifty little desk calendar, and the dust begins to settle in Times Square, the New Year creeps into our lives like an eerie morning fog.  With our champagne hangovers and glitter in our hair, we approach January 1^st as certain type of re-birth; and annual baptism, if you will. 

Lists are made with new goals: a goal job, a goal weight.  We raise the bar for ourselves because as each minute creeps by, we find ourselves reflecting on the days where we sat and let life just wash over us.  Those days, gone like our lovers past.  Hints of them left; the only constant being you. 

Our annual re-birth is much like our initial experience; raw, violent.  The past, screaming in the face of the new.  And you, the creator, find the ability to mold the immediate future.  There is no real sense of physical permanence, but a mental permanence is what drives us toward this renewal.  We can convince ourselves that the person who runs faster is healthier, the person who loves more passionately is an improved person; the person we are meant to be. 

Finding ourselves at the curtain call for the year is like looking at a hand you have just been dealt: completely random, and permanent.  I realize it is how we play the hand is what’s important, but that initial shock is what takes your breath away.  The realization that something is coming to a close, and something is starting once again.  The reality about New Years is the perhaps disappointing amount of little change that happens when that clock hits midnight.  There you are, standing staring at a clock as though you were a third grader in June; aching for summer.  Midnight comes once a day, come thick or thin.  And yet tonight?  Tonight it is important. 

Instant transformation is impossible to come by.  Our ability to approach life from a gradual perspective teaches us both patience and value.  It teaches us to be patient for the things we want for ourselves, as well as the value of what we have currently and want possibly.  We should approach each day as though it was the New Year.  That midnight no longer turns us into pumpkins, but rather turns us into a day closer to who we wish to be. 

We are re-born; not as people, but as dreamers.  

Great Moments in Romance: a selection of music that strikes a literal and figurative romantic chord

Cinematic Orchestra- “To Build A Home”

Great Moments in Romance: a selection of music that strikes a literal and figurative romantic chord

The Shirelles- “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”

Great Moments in Romance: a selection of music that strikes a literal and figurative romantic chord

Bob Dylan- “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”

I had a woman call today to price a few of our designer wedding gowns.  Most of the time, I assume they are pricing out the dresses just to see if it is remotely in their price range.  While we don’t offer multi thousand dollar gowns, and I am no Vera, we still offer expensive wedding gowns. 

Brides are finicky creatures. I have encountered a few in my short time here that range from raging bitch to raging beauty queen; the type that giggle after each word.  I am perky, but Christ. 

The woman and I do the usual wedding dress tango, she gives me an item number, I tell her the price.  Pretty standard procedure.  She then proceeds to tell me that she is not really a girly girl, and that she would get married in red if she could.  I instantly laugh because honestly, I applaud her for wanting to have a wedding her way; that is how it should be.  If you want to get married dressed as a banana, then you damn well should. 

She then tell me that her future wife wants her to be the girly one, and pictured her soon to be bride in a form of ivory on their big day.  I was caught a little off guard. I had that “oh” moment.  And then suddenly, I found myself instantly so proud of her, and so happy for her.  Here we were, carrying on; doing the same wedding dress tango.  Just like I do with everyone else.  She tells me that she has been putting off the dress hunt because she is not your average size 4, and that she is really more excited about being married than some silly dress.

We talked a little while longer, and then I wished her good luck on her wedding and we hung up.  I treated this as any other inquisitive bride, because it did feel so normal.  Same bride problems, same bride opinions.  But a much different outcome.  

Gay marriage is at the forefront of conversations, and are no longer just this pipe dream.  Real people, making real phone calls about real wedding dresses.  It made it so much more real for me. 

I can’t wait to get married one day.  

Like instances that only occur once or the flash of light in the corner of your eye.  Like a camera going off in a crowd, it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact location, but the action is obvious.  The written word is a lot like the worse case of the trots you have ever had; it’s messy and sometimes painful.  There are big words and small words and meaningless words and timeless words and scary words and impressive words.  A flash in the pan.  A wrinkle in the fabric of your mind.  Iron as hard you like, the wrinkle remains.  Words can stay with us for days, or leave our minds in seconds.  We can brush them off like soot, or wear them as a coat of arms.  There are the kind that apologize for words before it, and words warning us of the words to come.  Words are meant to comfort, and harm at the same time.  To fix the problem, and create it.  Words may be the root of all we do say, and the root of everything we don’t. 

 But most of all, words are all we have.  Because our words are just that:  our own.  

At some point this week, Stephen Hawking made me feel small.  As a six foot tall gay man, that rarely happens.  There are few things that make me feel small; the ocean, the sky.  But things we see everyday never make me feel small.  I begin to feel like a cog, as opposed to an individual.  But Stephen Hawking began to describe the outer rims of space, with its wormholes and black holes, and suddenly I felt as though I was this momentary blip in the history of human existence.  That years from now, the Sun itself would grow to a size in which it would incinerate the Earth.  That years from now, we will have the technology to travel across both space and time. And yet at this very moment, I am merely a person with words and thoughts on a screen.  Things continue to grow and die, and there you are. 

We only know so much.  The rest?  We are simply children with jobs and money; eyes still looking up to the sky for the answer.  

I always stop by Facebook at some point each evening, aching to say something amazingly poignant or terribly witty.  And yet when I arrive there, I find myself looking into something I don’t recognize; something I never felt a part of to begin with. 

I never thought of myself as a private person.  I have thought of myself as shy by circumstance, or even cerebral, but never private.  My life is as though it was one of those oversized children’s books; the kind with large pictures trying to get the point across.  The text is bold, and readable.  But you still have to know how to read it.  The words are meaningless to the illiterate, and all that’s left are the pictures.   These types of fleeting moments you share with your peripheral social network are like this; quick, short, to the point.  But they lack the real depth the human experience requests of us.  That moment of clarity, of instant connection, is what we ache for.  The slight graze of a hand, or a bumped knee.  Quiet breathing in the dark next to a faceless shape.  Our cyber reality is cold, and sterile.  As though you were sitting on an examining table; with the paper sheets and alcohol swabs.  Under the harsh fluorescent lights, we all squint.  At the end of the day, we are all scratching to get into something we don’t understand.  All in the hopes our actions go un-noticed, that someone is staring at our obvious pictures. 

But there is a lot to be said for those who can read the text in front of them; for those who yearn to learn more.  Reading beyond the random outbursts or the status updates.  Beyond the check-ins and the tags, there are people.  People quietly living in an existence being witnessed by others, and yet the faux reality we’ve created is unlike ourselves.  There are only images; a pictorial rhetoric that speaks in short run-on sentences.   Like quick jabs with a knife, they are there and gone in an instant. 

Read between the images.  Look for the text, when all you can see are visuals.  Our quiet nature is only as loud as we allow it.  Our reality is only as real as we make it.  

I started thinking about ghosts today.  The type that haunts you, long after you began being haunted.  The kind that provoke you; stare at you square in the face.  I don’t think we as people are afraid of things that go bump in the night, but rather the types of things that taunt us. 

We are haunted not by ghosts, but by ourselves.  Ghosts of who we used to be; unrecognizable faces in the dark.  We are haunted by decisions we have made, or things we may have said in a moment of passion.  Our actions can sometimes be scarier than anything grabbing you from a dark alley.  Our thoughts can haunt us in a way nothing else can.  Things like pain, or regret, can stay with you long after the initial incident is gone.  Sentences that made sense at the time, now seem like someone else’s words.  These things that haunt our steps; our current actions.  The ghosts of our past are very much so our present.  The reality of “the present” is actually quite terrifying.  Because the ghosts of our past dictate the present day; in more ways than we know.  

I am the type of person who holds onto the lap-bar extremely tight the first time I am on a ride.  It is half thrill and half terror, but I wholly hold on.  There is that tiny voice in your head telling you to let go, regardless of the consequence.  But our brain innately tells us to hold on tight while everything around us is going to fast; we ache for something to cling to.

I’ve always thought of this to be such a portrait of love; or the type of love we ought to strive for.  Love simply meaning something we cling to when the ride becomes too exciting not to share with someone else. 

My parents told me that I used to yell at the top of my lungs at the beach.  I am not sure if it was the waves or the sand or just the epicness of it all, but I used to scream.  It wasn’t that terrifying “I am getting dragged into a windowless van” type of scream, but that thrilled scream.  I was a kid; a kid who liked to have a good time at all hours during all seasons.  What I think enjoyed about my childhood was that I really did get to be a kid.  And while it was sprinkled with moments of adulthood and responsibility, my childhood could not be taken away from me. 

My reasons for attending Occupy L.A. were just as blurred as the bi-partisan issues we were protesting.  As a twentysomething, I don’t have this aching desire to re-live the 60’s; at least not the later part of it anyway.  To compare the two would be like comparing a war to another.  The shell may look the same, but the issue within is completely different at its core.  I had convinced myself that I was attending an event that was worth seeing with my own eyes before I made any rash judgments on the movement myself. 

My sign, since I have always been a huge proponent of sign holding, read: “Laid Off Twice- One Year.”  I had found a niche within the movement in which I was to protest, and to tell the truth I have been blazing mad for the past year or so.  And while I am now currently employed, the sting from the past year hasn’t gone away. It was traumatizing; and taxing on my mental health.  Which is why I wanted to protest; I actually had something to load my gun with. 

I was an angry twentysomething.  I was angry about what was happening to me and millions of other people.  But the protest itself was fairly peaceful; quiet even.  Reminiscent of the sounds of the rainforest; animals making their own noises independently of those around them.  I quietly looked up and down the streets; I think I was waiting for something to light on fire or a car bomb.  But nothing ever happened; just signs and the honking of supportive car horns.  But then it got suddenly loud:

The picture doesn’t do the moment any justice.  The kid was holding a Ron Paul sign, and on the back he had hand written “fight the system.”  The quiet streets were suddenly littered with the sounds and screams of this pint size occupant.  His father, quietly standing behind him, watching his own Pinocchio be a real boy.  The young boy screaming things like “bring our soldiers home, it’s a senseless war” and “stop the people in charge, power to the people!”  The passion in this child’s voice was brazen, with a tireless fervor.   The faces of those were a lot like mine; intrigued at first, but quickly wiped away by the severity of the situation.  Reality was staring us right in the face; the protest may still be too late for us twentysomethings.  Are we in such a state that 7 year olds are the only ones worth listening to?  Is this all for them?  And what difference would it make if we got the whole third grade out here on the picket line?

All the while, I couldn’t help think about my younger self, yelling at the beach.  Screaming at my own adolescence, as thought I was trying to find it among the endless waves.  Screaming in the hopes my childhood would never end; screaming for an endless summer.  Screaming because I was a child who could feel the moment; not screaming because I could quickly feel my childhood slipping away.