Post number six, hungry.

I’m on a fitness kick. Operation Adonis (OpAdon), as my friend Rob calls it, has been in effect for a couple of months. It feels good to take care of myself, slowly creep back into shape one pull-up at a time, after a couple of years of not giving a fuck.

As a result of my somewhat surprising dedication to exercise, I’m always hungry. Every few hours, I have to eat something. An apple. Nuts. On the go, I’ll even choke down a meal-replacement shake. Feeding my human machine feels like almost as much work as the gym, but like the gym, there is a beautiful simplicity to it---eat something, feel satisfied. Lift something, get stronger.

The hunger for love is just as persistent as the hunger for food, and as Shaw wrote, “the hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.”

When your phone rings and it isn’t who you want to call you. When you are online, and see all the people on your buddy list except the one you want to talk to. When you check the mail and find cards and letters from everyone but the one that matters. When you are in a roomful of beautiful people, and none of them are potentially the One.

Although it smells vaguely like desperation, it isn’t really. It’s healthy, as strange at that might sound. To be aware and open to the possibility of falling, without the oh-my-god-you-are-the-first-person-in-months-who-talked-to-me-so-we-better-start-picking-out-baby-names urgency, is an awesome feeling.

The sky is a little bit bluer with the knowledge that somewhere out there, right this minute, without a doubt, is someone you probably haven’t met yet who will make you fly. The more experiences I have, the clearer this becomes. My teenage movie-based ideal Love has slowly been replaced by something more subtle and a lot deeper, without me noticing. I am happy to know now that love is more complicated than Romeo + Juliet. While love at first sight certainly exists, it can also sneak up on you, tangling up around your heart, choking you beautifully.

Patience is a virtue, and like everything else in life, the harder the work, the sweeter the reward. I'm there.

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.” – Cervantes

Two quotations in one entry? What can I say, I’m a lazy bastard. Next thing you know, I’ll be cut-and-pasting song lyrics from the internet, forgoing original text completely. Until next time...

Post number five, the small things

OK, so another week has gone by. For someone as good at procrastinating as I am, this online journal business is hard work, especially since I boldly committed to keep it on the topic of love. Love doesn’t knock on the door every day. Although a day shouldn’t go by without love, they often do. Weeks. Months. Years, sometimes.

Still, there is love in the small things. Fresh sheets on the bed, for instance, with their crisp feel and clean outdoor smell. The sunshine after weeks of rain. Seeing a beloved movie again and, like an old friend, remembering the first encounter. A really good cheeseburger with perfectly crispy fries. And so on.

There is significance in everything, and significance in nothing. It’s all up to us to assign or uncover the meaning in everything that we do.

The seemingly banal things are only dull if we don’t recognize their significance. This week, I’ve realized I was wrong to criticize bloggers writing long odes to their day-to-day. I propose that these documentarians of daily life are bravely putting this stuff out here in the ether with hope that someone (maybe the writer himself) will react and understand and help figure it all out. Just like me.

The stuff that makes up our lives is only boring only when we forget to pay attention. Even waiting in line at the grocery can be noteworthy, eyes open.

So I don't miss out on any of the lovely little things, I try to live completely in the moment---spontaneous and open to anything, while at the same time completely aware of what is happening and what it means. It’s sort of like living in stereo, after years of really enjoying it mono. Mono is great, but once you hear stereo, it is hard to go back.

Jesus Christ, I sound like a Hallmark-card-writing-goody-two-shoes-granola-eating-hippy-with-a-high-school-diploma-and-a-shelf-full-of-Robert-Frost. I’m not. Really. I promise. I’m gnawing on a steak bone right this second, scratching myself and trying to find SportsCenter on TV.

But there really is love in the small things. Sometimes so much it can make you cry.

Post number four, Mmmmm, red meat.

Red meat. Some people like it well done, some people like it bloody. A lot like love. Sure, there are a million different personalities, kinks, and fetishes, and only so many ways you can cook a steak. But still...

Tonight was steak. Ah, gentle nonexistent reader, you must be wondering how, after just three posts, I’ve broken my rule and started blogging like a moron about what I had for dinner. Bear with me…my lamb chops really were fantastic.

I like them bloody. I like to feel my teeth break down the tissue in my mouth, tender and chewy at the same time. He likes his meat well done, crispy and cooked through. "He" is an old friend, and a new friend. It doesn’t take Holmes and Watson to figure out that he is first love---(from now on known here as FL) revisited in a different context.

A tiny, drunken asian woman and her equally drunk, ambiguously gay friend stopped at our table while we were waiting for our meat. She stood staring at us for what seemed like an eternity, trying to make up her mind. Finally, she swallowed hard and slid uninvited into our booth, to shamelessly flirt with FL.

That this complete stranger came to our table, sat down next to him, and shyly confessed that she found him extremely attractive stunned FL a bit but fit seamlessly into my reality. If it happened in a movie, I would have thought it a bit much. But tonight, of course it made perfect sense. Luckily for the Lonely Optimist, the drunken, ugly 'mo friend squeezed into the booth next to me, wheezing a boozey introduction and wanting to know where we lived. Hmmm, I'll pass on the pickled mutton, thanks just the same.

I left an untouched lamb chop on my plate, the significance of which I obsessed silently about, in context of the evening’s surreal asian lawyer chick tinge. I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Fellini. Oh, and the check, please.

Cut to: interior, car, night. Driving around looking for an open coffee shop in Los Angeles at 11PM on a Wednesday night. May as well have been looking for a unicorn or an honest man. We talked for hours, and could easily have talked some more. Shared secrets, said some of the things that couldn’t be said before, laughed, teased, tried to gross each other out. I learned some things about FL---the measuring stick, for God's sake--- that I’d never known before. None of it bad, no matter how taboo---instead, all of it was like little missing pieces slowly filling a big puzzle.

Suddenly, it was the Lonely Optimist’s bedtime. Tick-tock, No coffee shop for you. Drop him off and get home before the car becomes a pumpkin and you are stuck in Crenshaw. Check.

I waited in the car, to make sure FL got into the house safely. Watched him run up the steps. Unexpectedly, he turned around and ran back. I rolled down the window. He complimented how my car looked in the night. Somewhere in my head, music played.

Why did I have to say it?

“I love you.”

What a dope.

What a maroon, as Bugs Bunny would say.

What I meant to say is, “I love you, in a nonjudgmental, helpful, totally selfless and caring way. I want to help you heal, and for you to help me. I want for you to be happy, just as I want me to be happy, and I hope that we all are happy happy happy until the end of fucking time.”

Bullshit. No, but maybe not completely honest.

Let me rephrase that again.

“I love you in a completely judgmental, less than helpful, totally selfish way.”

True? Not at all, but nicely self-depricating.

How about, “I love that I feel so grown up that I could go out to a meal with you and actually not be too nervous to eat.”

No…completely true, though.

Fine. What I meant to say is just. “I love you.” Like the leftover lamb chop, it is what it is----perhaps not meant to be eaten, meant to be eaten at a different time, or maybe just one goddamned lamb chop too many.

Nevertheless, it is still just a lamb chop.

Unlike a lamb chop, though, he made eye contact and said, “I love you too.”

Such sweet sorrow.

Post number three, the open letter.

I admire you. I admire your talent. I admire your personality. I admire your looks. Unfortunately, you don’t know what I felt like when we met years ago, when I fell in love with you. Now, all this time later, we are friends. You with a broken heart, me a little sad that I haven’t been as lucky in love as I have been in life.

The Lonely Optimist’s Lesson Number One:
When you fall in love for the first time, whether or not it be with someone who loves you back, that person becomes the measuring stick against which all future people are measured. This is fine. Nobody is ever perfect. Except for that one person. What a wonderful thing to experience. To touch what will become the ideal.

I couldn’t sleep the other night. Every time I closed my eyes, I had the same dream about you. You were silent, smiling, beckoning me. As I came closer, we embraced. It felt... We kissed. Your lips, like razor blades, cut me. It hurt, but like a moth to flame I couldn’t help myself. I had to kiss you again. Bleeding. Hurting. Another kiss. In bloody agony, I woke up. Took a piss. Back to bed. Eyes closed. Same dream again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

No matter how far over it I thought I was, you looked at me with those beautiful brown eyes and flashes that perfect smile, and I was toast. Melted butter. Pudding. Suddenly, for me it was like yesterday. For you, though, it is just friends. Time has passed. The banality of plutonic love connects us.

The Lonely Optimist’s Lesson Number Two:
You should never meet the person from Lesson Number One again. No matter the time elapsed, no matter the water under the bridge, no matter how badly your heart was broken, if you ever meet up with that person, you are fucked, because they are the measuring stick. They are the one. They are the ten. Alpha. Omega. And all that jazz.

You will never love me. It is hard to fathom that you never did. Hard to believe that a feeling as powerful as love can be completely one-sided. But I gotta learn. I gotta accept. You never loved me. You never loved me. You never loved me. It is OK. OK and honest.

You will never love me. I got it. As a concept, I can totally deal. As a truth, I can mentally understand. As a fact, I can accept. In my heart, though, there will always be a place for my own private _______, nervous and closeted and wanting and obsessive. Innocent like me, untouched by reality.

The Lonely Optimist’s Lesson Number Three:
The only hope is to meet someone better than the measuring stick. Someone who is all of the things by which we judge potential fucks and loves---great personality, character, passion, looks, and sex appeal---and more. Someone who loves us back. Someone who finds in us all of things we find in him. Someone who not only believes in Love, but in Love with You.

When lesson three is complete, there is hope. For the future. For a time when I can hear your voice singing on the radio and not want to cry.

As I write this, I have the distinct feeling that you’d prefer this letter came from someone else---from your own first love and measuring stick. I completely understand, trust me. This is every man’s cross to bear,

So where does that leave us? Friends, always, to be sure. I might be a freak, though, until I learn lesson number three. And I will definitely want to get in your pants, and to see you at every opportunity I get. You will stay the measuring stick, like it or not, for now. For now.

Imagine how it would feel for you not to be your own first love’s first love. Pathetic mouthful, huh?

Post number two, regarding first love.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

Falling in love for the first time is the easiest thing in the world. Like all first time anythings, it comes free of baggage and preconceptions. Mine took me completely by surprise. I was innocently walking along one day, minding my own business, and there you were. Suddenly my heart started pounding. My palms started sweating. I lost the ability to speak. Bing. My stomach ached from the nervous excitement. I agreed with everything you said. I stared perhaps a bit too long at your lips. Bing. Bang. Then we kissed. Boom. World on a string. Better than candy. Better than cocaine. So incredibly good it absolutely, positively has to have really side effects, but I did it anyway. In excess. All the time.

Then, as quickly as it happened, it evaporated. I got dumped. First time out of the box.

Like a good little soldier (after a year or so of consolation from my friend Mr. Booze), I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and went on about life.

Years went by. I got dumped a few more times. I did the dumping a few times. Everything was going so well, learning, growing, waiting for the call to be on Oprah and explain it all.

Until by chance, I met you again. First love. Unequal love. Love long buried and forgotten. Walking down the street.

No longer innocent, no longer minding exclusively my own business, I said hello. It had been years since last we spoke, and still my heart started pounding. My palms started sweating. Be cool, boy. Don't blow this second chance. You said hello back. We got a couple of root beers together. The nervous energy coursed through my body looking for a release, which it finally found in a forced, high-pitched laugh. Keep it together. Easy now. The encounter ended with the vague promise of a future brunch. I went home and dreamt of you. Again. After all this time. All those tears.

Falling in love for the first time is the hardest thing in the world.

Do we ever get completely over it?

Post number one, regarding the title of my blog.

This blog is about joy, agony, adrenline rushes and gut wrenching physical pain. About love. I haven't looked at many other blogs, but am fairly certain without any research that this isn't the only one of its kind. So I add another love blog to the ether. Keeping with this theme of originality, I stole the title from the thesis joke in Woody Allen's film ANNIE HALL.

A guy goes to a shrink. "My brother thinks he's a chicken."
The shrink asks him, "Well, why don't you turn him in?"
"Because I need the eggs."

Woody explains it much more elegantly than I can, at least more elegantly than I can without plagarizing Mr. Allen. If you haven't seen it, you should. It is one hell of a movie.

I won't stray too far afield of the topic. No rants about the everydayness of life. No complaints about the banal. With one exception. I wish they weren't called blogs. It makes me feel like the impolite noise of a pimply faced teenager.

And yet, pimply faced teenagers know a lot about love. Or at least about the potent mix of hormones and confusion known as first love. A good place to start, the beginning. Maybe blog isn't such a bad word after all...