Ravings of a Random Mind...

When I was younger, I subscribed to the ideal of the white picket fence, 3BR house, a husband, a dog, some number of kids... the whole shebang. I was going to be one of those "normal gays". I've since grown up and realised that I'm not. Not now, and not ever going to be. That is not to cast dispersions upon those who've done exactly that. Some of us really are "just like you", and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of my best friends... Yeah, you know where that's going. Seriously though, it's a perfectly viable option. For someone else. I've learned a lot about myself since my early 20s, and one of those things is that I'm not suited to the nuclear family dynamic. I used to think that this meant that there were certain things I was just going to have to miss out on. Children being primary among them. If I wanted kids, I was going to have to have a partner to raise them, right? That's how it's done, properly. Being a singl...

This last weekend I went to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy film with my friend JMc. Before the film, we decided to get dinner, and since he's new to Seattle - recently transplanted from London - and there are a number of places I haven't yet been to, I took the opportunity to suggest DragonFish . It was close to the movie theatre, and I'd always walked past it on my way to someplace else, thinking I'd make a point of going later. Of course, later never really happens unless it's on the calendar. I arrived early, put my name in for a table, and was seated outside on the patio. The weather was nice (I'd just spent the afternoon at the beach), the sun was still up, and it was quite warm for Seattle. When JMc joined me a few minutes later, we commented on the lovely weather, "How often do I get to sit outside in Seattle without a cover?" The waitress came by and took our first orders - we didn't really decide to do a sort of tapas, one plate a...

The idea of this was that it would be written more as prose, but that it should be read more as poetry. As such, some of it is symbolic, a bit disjointed, sort of stream-of-consciousness. _______________________________________________ The other day I was walking past the University commons, and I thought about what might have been. How much I miss you, and how I would have done things differently if I had them to do again. The different choices I would make to keep you from leaving. I kept going back further and further, changing the timeline again and again, until I got to the point where we met... and I kept going. How different our lives would have been if I could go way back, back before we were both damaged by those we'd been with before we met. I went all the way back to my High School graduation, these 20 years gone. If I had gone to NKU right out of school, and known what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, instead of allowing others to dictate to me what I should be ...

I do not believe in Perfection; in fact, I firmly believe in Imperfection. Not as a goal to achieve, but as a reality of the world in which we live. No one, and nothing, is ever going to be perfect. This is not to say that one should not strive to better one's self; quite the contrary. One should always seek to improve one's self. Not to be perfect, but to be a better version of one's self than previous. In Judaism, we have 613 Mitzvot (commandments). Basically, every time in the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers) where the text reads "...and G-d said 'Do ______'", or "...G-d said, 'Do Not _____'", that is a Mitzvah - "Commanded by G-d" - to do, or to avoid doing these things. It is quite impossible to do all of them, especially as a great number of them deal specifically with rituals to be performed only by the High Priest in the Temple in Jerusalem. These Temple ritual...