Let me lie in this bed I've made and I'll call you in the morning...

love ( P ) (lv)n.
A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

Lately things have been

happening

to me that are far from

the norm...

and do I mean far...

as in so far out,

the buses don't even run out there...

that far.

Now before I mislead you all,

let me make clear one thing...

I have always strayed

from the paths

of comfort and familiar,

the lanes of

normalcy and obviousness,

the trails which

lead to security and approval.

Upon reading Kerouac,

Salinger, Ferlinghetti,

Bukowski, and of course,

the granddaddies of them all,

Orwell, Huxley, Nietzche,

Voltaire and Sartre at a

tender young age,

I was deeply influenced

and greatly seduced into

the world of experience.

Good and bad,

noble and heinous,

poetic and horrific...

I wanted to try them all.

The happy,

the horrible,

the morally sound,

the criminally deranged...

every single situation

that a human being could encounter

I wanted to know.

There was a certain romantic air

to the notion of living

a life based solely on

seeking out as many different

experiences as possible...

I was drunk with the thought

of facing all situations,

foreign and familiar,

without judgement

or a previously formed opinion.

And then I read Thoreau.

Having delved brain first

with my heart nipping

at its heel into "Walden",

my emotional

and spiritual

malnutrition

was immediately

remedied upon reading:

"I learned this, at least, by my experience,

that if one advances confidently

in the direction of his dreams,

and endeavors to live the life

which he has imagined,

he will meet with a success

unexpected in common hours.

He will put some things behind,

will pass an invisible boundary;

new, universal and more liberal laws

will begin to establish themselves

around and within him:

or the old laws will be expanded

and interpreted in his favour

in a more liberal sense,

and he will live

with the license of a

higher order of beings."

Samson had Delilah,

Van Gogh had absinthe,

Burroughs had heroin,

Bukowski had anything in a bottle,

and I had Thoreau...and the living thus began.

I've been terribly hurt

and I have returned the

favour numerous times,

I've been a drunk,

a connoisseur,

a junkie,

the life of the party,

an unemployed derelict,

a highly sought after employee

the talk of the town,

the shame of many an establishment,

a rather talented bad kid,

an embarrasment to my peers,co-workers and employers,

an asset to many a company,

a treasure to behold,

a plague to abhor,

a delight,

a nuisance,

a rising star,

a burnt out has-been...

anything and everything that

is to be greatly admired

and violently loathed,

I have draped myself in and

paraded about as if on display

in some archaic and abhorent gallery

for the innocent and unexposed.

But now things have developed

in such a fashion that

I am completely left

speechless and unaware...

and I think I'm rather enjoying it.

to be continued