Falling in love is beautiful.  But so is getting drunk.  Falling in love is giving in.  Some men can fall in love, in one second, with a woman he passes on the street.  He may even find a way to make her fall in love with him.  So what?

Love conquers, but then what?  Love is tearful and tragic.  It is selfish in the sense of conquest. It is possesive in the sense that we talk about "having" somebody.  It is as ugly as greed.  Love without friendship leaves only pain and agony.  Love alone simply doesn't work.  It has no real value.

It is necessary to think of friendship as something higher than love.  It is not a second prize, it is the only prize.  Even in marriage...everyone loves who they marry...but what misery a couple experiences if they don't explore and develop friendship.  How cold and calculative the arguments.  How selfish the decisions.  How insensitive the words.  How boring and basic the sex without the playfulness of friendship.  How ugly!

Love is not the goal...it is the given.  It is the effortless part.  Laughter is the goal.  Growth.  Support.  Help.  Sensitivity.  Selflessness.  Forgiveness.  Caring.  Curiosity.  Hope. Friendship.

And how interesting that, while romance and sex can easily flow from a beautiful friendship, pain does not.

In all these years, I've never written about being alone.  I've never really been alone, in that I've had a soul mate who always has shared my dreams and my reality.  What is different now is that she travels often on business, and so the feeling of loneliness is becoming a familiar one.

I have generally liked my own company, but these days perhaps not as much.  I am no longer smug in my self-assurance that I am perfect.  Perhaps I need someone there to look at me in the way I want to be able to look at myself. 

I don't want to need anything, but I do.  I need to feel as though the entire world isn't moving while I am still, alone, and forgotten about.  I know that I'm not forgotten about, and perhaps my appetite is simply too large.  But I am the type who tortures himself with thoughts...who understands himself enough to know exactly where his weaknesses and imperfections lie.  When I am alone, these things stab at me from within.

Yet the idea of opposites is very real...these moments of loneliness only make moments of coexistance sweeter and fuller.

At this moment, how many people around the world stand on the verge of a fundamental betrayal of nature and their own humanity?  We were born into this world for a single, simple purpose: to be the unique genetic mutation that we are.  To respect nature itself is to be what we are and to allow others to be the sometimes strange yet overwhelmingly beautiful mutation that they are.

We all know this to be true at the deepest levels of our souls.  Without a doubt, we all feel it.  Nature as put this instinct in us.  To hide who we are or to conform is painful.  To force others to do the same is the same.  Every time any of us unquestionably obeys authority out of fear, when we look at others with envy and try to imitate, when we talk sports because everyone else is, when we augment our bodies with surgery, when we starve ourselves to look like models in magazines, when we take corporate drugs to make us seem normal, when our tax dollars are used to overthrow a democratically elected government and destroy the hope of a people, when we put someone in prison for choosing to enjoy marijuana...we are acting in betrayal of nature and we are selling our souls to the cancer that is the corporate-controlled system of oppression which is destroying the world.

Fuck it.  Be who you are and let others do the same.