Strange Days

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: To come.

I am staring at the calendar on the wall. June, already. Almost, July. I breathe. I sigh. I want. I want the summer to last forever. I want the days to always be longer, the sun to always feel warm and sexy on my arms. My life to always feel like it does in summer. Like it does right now. I am staring at the calendar on the wall. My birthday is almost here, a shared 24 hours with an equally epic event. Because on July 31, I will do more than simply cross the threshold into my thirties. I will cross the threshold into matrimony. On that day I will share vows, drink milk and pledge my love to the woman who always hides her face.

I wake up, perplexed and actinic from the light. The calendar is still there, just like in the dream. Briefly, I wonder if this is a dream within a dream. That would be terrible.

The calendar is real. I can touch it. It is smooth and cool. But, the date circled only says “Birthday,” not “Wedding” as it did minutes or years ago. This was not a dream within a dream. It was a dream within a staggered reality. Even worse.

After a minute and a glass of water, the dream seemed as silly and distant as my life has been recently. I don’t think on my wedding day I will “milk cows in the morning so my guests can have milk to drink.” But the mind works in often strange and unannounced ways. The rules change inside there. Sometimes they foreshadow, sometimes they awaken. Sometimes they milk. But whatever the experience, I give my dreams the same credence as I do my reality. Asleep or awake, when my being speaks, I listen. Sometimes, I do so merely to forget.

The self-diagnosis for this was simple, maybe even beneath me. I’ve interpreted far more deep and disturbing dreams—sex, beatings, balloon animals, Madison. This one was farm-club quality by comparison, even without the cows.

So here’s my interpretation: I will turn 30 in a little over a month. If I got married on that day, I would still end up behind in life. I see my friends around me getting married, having kids, having lives. I’m not jealous, but I am worried that I have a lot of catching up to do. Aunts, uncles, friends, sisters all ask the same question. Mothers, fathers, friends, neighbors all hope for the same thing, a structured path through life.

But times have changed, and life was much different for our parents. That I can qualify. But when I see these life stage enumerations happening to my own generation I start to wonder, am I missing the boat? Or even worse, have I missed it?

Marriage is not in my near future. I can’t even see myself getting laid anytime soon. I need to clean up the whole internal homestead before I am comfortable inviting someone else in. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two months, the unorthodox cleanup of years of toxic buildup. I’m using a Dixie cup to pick up a lake of sludge, yet I’m happy with the subtle progress.

Which leads me to my next question: Have I ever been in love? Yes. But not in the conventional way. Not in the “making sacrifices” or “sandwich night” or “meeting your parents” kind of way. Because, for most of my life, love and sex have been the same force. For me, love is a physical and emotional rush that is as momentary as it is impactful. At the moment of release, I am in love with the woman in my grasp. She is my bride, my lover, my soulmate dressed in sweat. But minutes later she is a woman. Ordinary and indelicate. Unpronounceable. She is a woman behind the DMV counter. A detached woman, if for no other reason than the emotional distance I have readily created.

I would walk away from every girl I have had sex with, the instant afterward. And in some cases, I have. But that doesn’t take away from my feelings for her minutes before, when there was nothing else in my life but her skin, her smell, her shirt on the floor. And me.

I’m just trying to make that instant longer. Then, maybe, I will be in love. Then I will find what I’m looking for. Then I will be me, and she will be “her.” To stretch that instant to a minute, a day, a week, a lifetime is all I can hope to accomplish in the near term. And I know it sounds like empty platitudes, but maybe I just need to right person to do that. To steer, guide and pre-empt. To stop the hands of time, yet deliver them in the process.

But I haven’t found her yet. And I won’t until I find myself.

I was watching Six Feet Under last night on TiVo. It was sad. Not the subject matter, but how my feelings have changed about the show. When I found out this would be the last season, I was bummed and immediately went into detachment mode. I was waiting in the DMV line, once again.

The first episode, I felt unfulfilled. But, It would probably get better next week. It didn’t. And now I keep wondering how much of this is self-imposed. Have I narrowed my focus and heightened my critical eye because I see the end? I haven’t even watched the third episode, but already I feel like the guy staying with his girlfriend only because it’s the last few months of senior year. A milestone will come that will let him off the hook for his indifference. He is kind and evil. He strings her along, he slips her away.

So, I will probably do the same with the show. As it ebbs toward its downward spiral, I will watch with the silent grace of indifference. I will participate in this feeling and hopefully learn from it. Hopefully learn from all of this. Because 30 is right around the corner. It is my graduation into a new sphere of reality. A new set of expectations and hardships. Thirty is almost here. I can’t fucking wait.