Siddhartha

Mission 1. Hook up with someone as old as my mom (54) and as young as my sister (20) in a month.
Mission 2. Live a completely gay lifestyle (without the gay sex) for a month.
Mission Three: Live without the security of four walls.

A great man once said Rob Lowe’s missions are “living, breathing, sizzling, shedding, humping, lusty animals.” Well, maybe it wasn’t a great man, but someone said it. And that’s good enough for me.

I love advice. And the reason I love it is because I get an outside perspective that keeps my thoughts alive and moving forward. I especially liked the comment from Libby that reminded me, and I’m paraphrashing: Just because you blogged it doesn’t mean you have to do it. It made me think.

Yesterday, I found many people focusing on the gambling part of my mission. Makes sense, since it was the most salacious detail. I went back and reread my post and I realized I wasn’t doing well in making my point. Truthfully, as over-the-top as it seems, the 10K bet was conceived as an afterthought. Retro was right, it did have something to do with Vegas clouding my vision. Maybe it was the lights, the glitz or the manner in which cash was worshipped, but I slipped into a place where I wanted to escape and fit in at the same time.

I choose my missions based on my state of mind. It is a reaction to the sunset of the previous mission, in much the same way as the fictional Siddhartha. For the first mission, I wanted to do something CelebRob would never do. And I think I did. Prior to hooking up with both those ladies in a month, I had only been sexually active with nine women in my life. As the light was fading from that mission, I felt I was getting too focused on sex. To be intimate with two women in one month was a bit overwhelming, given my past sexual history.

So I decided to try to be less macho by living the gay lifestyle in Mission Two. The fallout from that was I found myself getting caught up in the world of materialism, between my over-indulgent gay friends and my bourgeois parents. For me, the path of excess did not lead to the palace of wisdom. It lead to the palace of confusion.

For Mission 3, I decided to just get rid of the car, abandon the apartment for a month, and walk the earth, just like Kane or Jules. I wanted to experience things and make the material world immaterial to my happiness. To see if I could live without a four-walled security blanket.

I needed to take some time to live below my means, since for so long I was living beyond it.

The $10K bet was meant to be my final “Fuck You” to the almighty dollar. To prove that although I needed it to survive, I didn’t need it to live. It was me lording myself over the elusive dollar that has become a universal flashpoint for wars, murders and the slow death of people in search of it. I would assert my power over money, rather than allow it to assert its power over me. It was to become an ancillary player in my grand musical.

I’m not a communist or socialist, rather I’m trying to focus on what brings people together, rather than divides them. Because there are things like love, family, friendship, compassion and sex that we can share in life, regardless of our socio-economic status. Happiness can still be found without money. The day will still turn to night without money. People will still fall in love without money. People will still die without it. Money, by far is society’s most divisive mechanism, yet it can be society’s least necessary.

Initially, burning the $10K in a wild and indulgent flash seemed right. Truthfully, it still does, but for other reasons that I initially thought. I just didn’t want to make this seem like a publicity stunt, so that part of my mission will be rethought. I wasn’t in the right place to make that decision, and once I am I can revisit the idea on a more personal and involved basis. Now, if I get to that spiritual cliff, where money is not all that important, I may go to Vegas and bet it all. But, that will be a personal part of the mission that I probably will not share. But I will share the most important parts of the journey, and all the discoveries associated with them.

Yes, at the end of this month, Rob Lowe could be lighting cigars with $20's, or maybe not. But I don’t really thing that will have any bearing on our time spent together. Because I think we all connect is ways that don’t require cash. We connect in ways that only require that we be human.