LOVE IS HERE TO STAY

Sometimes I think that the act of looking for love is like searching for a lawyer to put on retainer to defend your right to be happy forever.  Unfortunately the lawyer I seem to attract of late, is basically Rudy Giuliani who pretty much guarantees that my partner will be chaos.

I have known great love in my life.   If you visit the Museum of Me you can visit floor after floor of exhibits that are dedicated to some of the legendary women of my life, who remain, in perpetuity, shimmering, lusty, ageless and still very much alive.  They are beautiful in their frames of gold and glitter, untouched, defiantly, by time or disappointment.  It’s like my heart has been extracted by early a team of Ancient Greeks who mastered the art of epic, emotional preservation.

They are always there, my ladies of perpetual passion, ceremonially candle lit by their perfection, still, every bit as dazzled by me as I am by them.

Love in my early days was all about finding like-minded female thrill seekers, who were every bit as bold and brash me.  The sixties and seventies especially were decades where passion was a vital and sole ingredient of the fiery demonstrations which we built, day by day, like bonfires and effigies which in turn lit the torches that we carried for our outsized loves, who appeared, in our imaginations at least,  like Goddesses.

The deception of young love is that what we feel in the moment comes with an iron-clad lifetime warranty, which guarantees us, in skywriting, that the kind of hallucinatory bliss that we feel will never, ever die.

Through our twenties, we are just too toddler-stimulated, determined and daffy to bother with anything that mildly suggests even the faint air of inevitability, which seems oceans away, and so the perfectly stated in bold, fine print that comes with every love contract goes unread. 

In those days, when color seems just born and any meaningful experience feels like we ourselves invented it, what stars are really made of means little.  

We reached for glitter and for a brief moment of time, shyly flirted with the mystery of the moon.

The secrets that we shared then, burst and landed like the waning wax-like comet trails of fireworks which fall in exquisite defeat into the embryonic fluid of a nighttime bay.

The fears which we tried to corral, seemed far too savage and powerful to tame, so by sheer impulse, chose to let the horses run free in the unfettered countryside, studs that we all were, until, many, many years later the wisdom of our inner horse whisperers, which arrived like Shane arm flapping fringe, suddenly took over the reins of our lives and began to teach us how to soothe the savage beast.

The dreams, those million and one hot air balloons, that dotted the pure white, stretched canvas of our imagination, for the most part, remained just that: dots: the kind that represents the errant chaos of cities and towns of an American map which none of us will ever know or visit.   

When we are young, those dots could become the notes of a symphony or the points of color of a Seurat painting.

When we get older, with so many symphonies and paintings left unfinished, that is when the dots begin to fade and disappear just like our parents, our dogs, our partners and our most invincible friends who were always far more resilient than us.

This is when the fine print of the contract goes into effect and forever is forever canceled.

What lies ahead is certainty disguised as uncertainty.

We are the ones who are now oceans away.   Some us flew way beyond the horizon and achieved things that were unimaginable even to ourselves, while others have been left to try to memorialize the summers that have failed them.

We are forced, by age and circumstance, to assess the damage and place a price on the future.

It’s all guesswork of course.

God and biology are working independent of us, to make all of our decisions for us.

And we know that.  All the time.   Even when we are not thinking about it, trust me, we are thinking about it.

But we have a choice.

We can either succumb to the inclination to surrender, become bitter and unfathomably depressed.

Or we can choose and recommit ourselves to love.

Yes, love, that pesky little bitch who has defiled, disappointed and defeated us over and over again.

But here lies the difference between yesterday and today.

It’s one thing to allow love to have its way with you.  

It’s another thing completely for you to have your way with love.

I am saying to you unequivocally that you can have love on your own terms, especially if you are alone.

Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing.

I find that I now have the power to select like a fan waved Rajah populating his harem, what and who I want to love and when.   

The further and further I row from the point of my last heartache, the easier it seems to leap headfirst into the Match.com, which I think is called that because of the constant desire to strike a match to all those decades-old pictures that many women post, along with their pets, shots of them cavorting inexplicably and regrettably in a sombrero, riding a horse to God knows where or displaying their artwork, that they really, really should not.

But online dating does remind you of one thing: there is always hope.  There is always a possibility.  

There is great freedom in being older.  With it comes a near-primal craving for authenticity, the total embracing of self and the willingness to be just as foolish as you were when you were a full-time fool.

Plus we get all the toys we want to play with from the grown up’s version of Toys-R-Us: Apple.

You get to go to more Broadway shows (which you can go to cheaply), you can have meals in restaurants that have the same kind of rich history as you do, where you can chat up other diners to your left and right.  You can listen to your the music that inspires you the most on demand. You can go to day games at your local stadium, which is one of the few places that allows you to act and feel like a child again.

 You can read more.  In my case, I can write ALL the time.  I have a new play out there which was just produced, I have well over a dozen scripts.  For some reason, I have finally reached the apex of my abilities and I think it’s because I have finally dumped my partner: the younger me and what I have discovered is the deeper, more profound and emotionally transparent me.  

Once you reach the MRI  level of your life, trust me, it’s deep end swimming from here on in.

I find lately that I am bursting with the need to deploy color from the ranks of my soul.

I dress to express and not to impress.

I treat my body with respect, keep my weight down to almost high school level and find myself thanking the Gods of follicles that I still have a full head of hair.  And it’s white.   Up until now, I used to add color to it, which sadly made me look like Brady Bunch housekeeper,  Alice.  My  gorgeous friend Kate Vernon said to me: “When I see men color their hair it says to me that they are not comfortable with who they are.”

And she was right.

And as for aches and pains, they are brought to you by the letters C,B and D as in cannabinoid cream.   For those of you who are skeptical or paranoid (A) there are no psychoactive properties in them and (B) they fucking work like a miracle.

Life is hard.

Loss is at time unbearable.

But in this era where suicide seems like a celebrity option,  all I can say is:

Be in control of love.

Stop asking or even praying for everything that you want and instead become the superhero action figure version of you.  

Be loud.

Be proud.

Be impossible.

Be visible.

Be political.

Be a traveler: go to where you have either always dreamed of going (I went to Liverpool and France is next) or go, without an itinerary to places you never dreamed you’d be.  

Sing in the aisles of Kohls and CVS at the top of your lungs.

Swim further and further out, way, way beyond the safety that you are holding on to because it is simply not re-inflatable.

It is literally a waste of your invaluable breath.

Be passionate about being passionate, with great passion.

In other words, live.