Well, now.

Have I ever been deluged (am I making up words again or is that one real?), bombarded, buried with emails regarding my "Woe-is-me" drunkenly scrawled ramblings of Wednesday night. Every email has been a sweet bitch-slapping, charming butt-kicking, loving hit-to-the-back of head message. I owe responses. But I'm trying to come up with the apropos combination of flirtation/musing/bitchiness/cajoling to answer them back.

The funny - yet wonderful - thing about blogging is that it is all relative to moments in time. Much like life. In one, or a collective series of moments, we can feel inextricably one way. Mostly because we are "feeling" that way. Feelings are fluid. They can possess a viscosity that allows them to slowly move across your psyche, or a fire-consuming like content that races them from tip-of-toe-to-top-of-head in a day. My depressions are a crimson and orange lava slowly ebbing through my brain - my self-loathing’s are more sporadic - a summer-time brush fire, all consuming - but quickly extinguished.

I DO like my age. I'm so glad to be beyond the youthful bullshit of floating checks to get by (more often ending with the sound - BOING!), sleeping around to see if in others - I would/could/should find myself, rubbing one penny by itself (because - it was the richer kids who had TWO to rub together - not me) and the endless insecurities of maybe never being someone my parents could be proud of.

Oddly enough Sunday was a great self-esteem day. Gay Rodeo - men who appreciate men weekend. I got so much attention at Charlie’s that it became a little awkward hoping it wouldn't strike jealousy in my boyfriend’s heart. I felt very appreciated - even if it was as a Daddy.

I HAVE the HAVES. Things you aspire to have by 33. Car, House, Dog, Boyfriend, Friends and a wealth of memories of having done crazy things, illegal things, stupid things, happy things and in all of them "memorable" things. I have success because I beat the shit out of myself to get it. I convince myself that these things complete me, make me or enhance me. So isn't it funny that the people who read me - like me and have never seen or experienced these "Haves" - they have chosen to like me for my written word, my passionate ramblings, and my off-base humor. I am all states of evolution depending on which attribute or characteristic you are concentrating on - in some ways I'm a wise old man, in others a silly, naive, little boy.

Whether slow-moving lava or quick-burning fire - I do know this - I am a force of nature, an element of something bigger - and I evolve as slowly and as quickly as I can.

...who are you ? and where have you taken my face ???

it sucks, really - it just sucks. I've built my site on talking about the bigger issues and greater thoughts - i hope - so in context the post I begin to write is self-fulfilled and trite. but honestly at 33 - it sucks to begin to fade. I didn't write the rules - but I knew them - I've always known them. For all the people who disregard you when your young as "pretty" and "smart" - the pretty counts for so much more in the gay scene than you realize. Oh what it is to be a pretty face and hot body! When I was young - I looked - well fuck it - I looked pretty damn good. I thought my set-back was everything else. I hadnt gotten the degree, I wasn't making the $$$, I was driving a pick-up. But tonight - at 33 - hanging with my buddies who were in there 20's it was painfully obvious - that my muscles, my cock, my checking account, my BMW - were nothing. I had bags underneath my eyes that no ORIGINS product seemed to eliminate, I had a hairline that "ran" from me as quickly as it receded from my forehead, I had love handles that grew over muscle and my heart and my spirit hung half as high.

It's vain and it's BS, but it's the life we live in. Where smoother is pretty and tighter is better and younger is well, younger.

I used to own this bar - and now I'm barely taking up breathing room.