Someone said there’s two ways to live; One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is. And as a person tries to approach the second way it gets a little confusing. Every blade of grass has beauty. The smell when it rains. Watching the wind make the rain dance across a city street. Laying face down in the lawn snapping out of an acid trip with the sun on your back, feeling the breeze across the bottoms of your feet and tickling your back. If you’re not careful you can get distracted just looking at the sky at almost any given moment. And as I think these thoughts it’s a blur of several moments really. Captured across the previous 8 or 10 months of my meandering journey. Almost magical moments of focus, sensory overload that calmed the beast within.. What I wanted to write about is that feeling of presence, and how it can be so elusive when emotions run high. As I’m writing this I have a load of laundry that’s finishing up, a freshly cleaned apartment from trying to channel the jumbled energy I feel after seeing my family the last two days. For whatever reason lately that makes me feel anxious and jittery. Not like myself. No calm. No zen. No clarity. Wild swings back and forth between feelings and reality. Before writing this I was laying in the hot bath drinking ice water, which I was taking after having showered an hour or so before that - then masturbated, then music and a bath to try to clear my mind. Wishing I had someone in my life to get naked with and release some tension. Wondering about how much of what I do is just peacocking and chasing sex? As a man some of that is probably ingrained I guess? But there’s no straight line between; I saw my aging parents on Fri, attended a 3rd birthday party for my nephew yesterday, spending time with family and then coming home - channeling some of the jumbled energy into cleaning my entire apartment, cleaning myself, making myself feel new, doing a load of dog laundry so my pup has a nice fresh place to call home tonight…. And me being horny as fuck. Other than the energy I guess. Where does one put it sometimes? I’m supposed to breathe. Follow my breath. Meditate. Feel my chest rise and fall. Observe my thoughts, don’t engage with them. I’m the witness, not the thought itself. Well what I’m witnessing is an animal that wants to fuck something. Ideally someone I’m close with and have connection with. It sure is a lot more fun and recent lessons are ringing loud in my head that empty sex is more empty than it is sex. But the drive doesn’t care about those things. Just an empty insatiable need to unload some pent up feelings. Do my mom and dad turn me on? Obviously not you sick fuck. But the weird tension, all of the emotional ups and downs of seeing them and hearing some backwards views tacked onto a stressful work week last week… followed by the joy of seeing my nephew open his Mario Kart presents. Packaged up and brought to him by raging amounts of consumerism, colorful packaging, designed to make you want more colorful packaging - and for one brief moment it almost seemed worth it. And maybe these thoughts are shaped by that Hunter S Thompson quote: “For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.” How many man hours went into creating 90 seconds of joy on my nephew’s face? Probably best not to do the math honestly. This would have never gotten written if there was someone naked here with me right now. Not sure either activity would have been more productive, or resulted in anything more beautiful, just another wet mess in my bed. Like me laying here in a towel across two pillows so that my apparently-getting-old-back doesn’t hurt and I can type without aggravating my shoulder. Now I guess I’ll go force myself to finish the laundry, clean up the bathroom, hang some wet towels from trying to clean off the soul of this not-very-lonely-but-definitely-horny-Neanderthal. And in case anyone reads this, tomorrow I’ll go back to work with the rest of you squares and pretend like I give a fuck. When really I just want to be naked and feel the person next to me let go of themselves at my touch. Today it was just drugs and rock and roll - guess we’ll get the sex tomorrow.