Sarastro

You: Handsome and quirky, floppy haired and dark

Me: Starry-eyed and awkward, smiling back at you from my lunch table with my family

You: Lingering gaze and wide smiles

Me: Lingering smiles and wider gazes

You: Watched me with sad eyes as I left the restaurant

Me: Waited outside till you were done with your friends

You: Practically jogged down the street to where I was standing

Me: Watched the afternoon breeze play with your hair and the sun light up your eyes

“Enter post title”

Those of you, few but faithful, who know my actual identity, have asked for another post. But I haven’t had the inspiration for anything. I’ve been listening to “Sistereis”, sitting back into my armchair, swinging a glass of merlot, and generally refusing an outlet for my imagination. I enjoy too much the brimming bottle that is my constant, relentless emotional build-up as I introspect myself into molecules.

Long live the King

I have dreamed of that fedora, that certain glove for so long. But now the Man in the Mirror is gone. Rest in Peace Michael.

www.geocities.com/moosey90.

Revelations

A few things going through my mind today:

How far would you go, to know the your "Destiny"? To see the "Future"? How do you see time and space? Chance and coincidence?

There is no doubt that humanity is obsessed with the unknown. There is also no doubt there exists a common consensus that our day-to-day lives, however palpable, are dream-like and somehow amiss... that beyond the the 9-5 jobs and the mortgage payments, there exists something more fundamental and True, but unfortunately also something we recognise as out of our reach.

Do you agree that this is the case? Or is it be possible that we are just desperately hoping that there's more to life than "this"? Have we been in denial, refusing to believe that our daily routines are in fact what this life is all about?

Friday I was in Paris for work, and arrived in London at 9.30PM, tired, sweaty but also looking forward to going to a friend's birthday party. 1 shower, 2 spritzes of Allure, and 3 cab rides later (+ 1 Hail Mary for my return for civilisation), Charlie, Inigo and I were on our way to Bethnal Green for the affair.

It was then when I realised there was a new 'gay accessory' that was all the rage with London guppies (gay urban professionals).

In London, a city of expats and social eccentrics, and in the middle of a treacherous recession, who would have known a personal fortune teller and clairvoyant was the new Fendi Spybag equivalent?

Charlie swears by her. "She even got that dates right," he said as the cab wormed through Commercial Street, "she told me that I should expect a huge opportunity at work around the 20th of June." Lo and behold, come the 19th Charlie landed himself a spot in the middle of a large cross-border team on a new project.

Inigo wasn't entirely impressed by his. Though she'd told him a lot about himself, he says she predicted him meeting and falling for an "older Swiss-German gentleman" within in the next few months. "Older Swiss-German gentleman!" He exclaimed. Anyone who knows Inigo knows that whatever he drools on is at most 21 years of age and almost always of Mediterranean origin.

Nonetheless I was fascinated. Growing up in the a Middle-Eastern/Mediterranean, it was not unusual for my mother to host the occasional party with a guest clairvoyant, who stares into your emptied coffee cup and foretells both your happiness and pain.

I am not cynical. And I believe it is almost downright stupid to think that the world is limited to your 5 pitiful senses. Still, as I heard Charlie and Inigo's revelations, I wondered how much of it was a mindgame.

If you believe (with kabbalistic Certainty) that you are bound for big things on X date, you will attract that energy and those things into your life. August for me has always been a 'lucky month'. But it is only that because my heart has a firm expectation in what it brings, and as a result almost every August I've had has been magical. What these clairvoyants may be doing, therefore, is giving you the power to create the destiny you so seek by "predicting" certain events. In reality, what they are actually 'reading' is your personality, and what you hold dearest. They then 'predict' events based on this and a good personality leader will sow the seeds for the events to actually take place.

On what I thought was a separate note: the next day I sat quietly in church as the priest delivered his sermon in the awe-inspiring Brompton Oratory. My ears perked when he said the following:

"We mustn't forget that [our religion] is not an opinion or a matter of Earthly theories. It is a Revelation. It is Certainty. It cannot be arrived at by the human mind, unaided."

My mind instantly struggled with this declaration. Though seemingly benign, it spat in the face of millenia of mystic teachings and even some religions. In Islam, for example, and though we believe the word of God came from Moses, Jesus and Mohamed, we are insistent that religion and spirituality are things you are born with and that you only start to lose sight of with socialisation.

But there's another interpretation. Maybe what Jesus did (and what Moses did, and what Mohamed did) was reveal an unique energy into the world and instill Certainty in his people; do what the fortune teller is doing to Charlie on a 1,000,000 times larger and infinitely more wise scale. Predicting the prosperity of those who follow his teachings and promise great reward. All you need is faith, and faith is not belief or opinion, it is Certainty. This is how your life succeeds.

Pride and Prejudice

"I miss you..."

There it was, 4 months after I threw him out of my life in a nasty and scurilous text message, the validation I so secretly desired. It came in the middle of the night, of my slumber. It took my eyes several moments to focus on the screen of my phone. When I finally processed the 301 US area code, I felt a horrible mixture of guilt, triumph, and yearning.

I'd been thinking of him the past few days. It was, as I remembered well, his birthday on Thursday.

But in the morning as I bit into my apple, I realised that the ball was where I always hated it to be in relationships - my court.

My pride spoke first. That message is too little, too late. Even if it was true, that's a can of worms I need to stay away from. The exorcism of JD from both my mind and heart has been a long and bumpy road. Was I to make a U-turn after so much progress?

My yearning spoke next. The truth is, I miss him too. Isn't the truth supposed to 'set you free'? Isn't pride something you set aside when one dwells in matters of the heart?

But when you come right down to it, he sent 3 words. One of my recurring frustrations with him has always been his inability to match my expression. In the world of verbal and written communications, he was a frumpy jersey from Lillywhites and I was a fitted Romeo Gigli. So where is the moral dilemma? How/if to respond?

I picked up my phone and sent: "Me too."

Just because I will never put myself back into that relationship doesn't mean I can't be honest with myself and him. Just because things went belly-up doesn't mean we can't be grown-ups and move past this healthily. I made sure I finally restored the balance of expression, I childishly sent two words to trump his three. Maybe one day, if he's willing to talk, I'll admit that the failure of this relationship was partly my fault. I was the one with the 'experience', he had only spent time with one other guy before me, and it wasn't a relationship. I was the wise sage who always preached against long-distance relationships and their hazards, yet I raced into this one without thinking twice.

Qind - Queer Blogazine

The new issue of Qind is out, you'll be thrilled to know that "the Affirmation" contributed to the "Organic Growth" section.

Actually, the 4 articles in this section are very interesting, celibacy and orgies juxtaposed with glorious art.

Peace

M

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a freak show”

As fate would have it, there I was, sitting in row X with the vista of the O2 Arena before me, crowds in a consistent howl-applause mixture, lights flaring from every direction. At centre-stage, the Big Apple Circus had begun its routines. Men floated around in rolling hoops, women flew in the air and landed on strings, clowns on giant stilts stared at the crowd, pointing and laughing, and a ballerina balanced a giant metal cube on his nose.

The lights dimmed and from the ceiling bodies emerged, spinning at unbelievable speeds, hanging on to nothing but rope. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” solemnly spoke the MC, “this is a freak show. This…..is a freak show.”

The lights screamed once more and Britney Spears descended from heaven in a diamond orb.

The next 1.5 hours were nothing short of orgasmic as the legendary Miss Spears got her groove on oh so many times. And though you can certainly pinpoint a certain blandness in her expression- after a turbulent year and being virtually on lock-down by her father whilst on tour- she did not fail to make the zillion people in the audience gyrate with her. It was her against the music.

And it was, after all, a freak show, a circus. The return to good old penny-in-the-hat entertainment. But as we all stood gaping, laughing, dancing and screaming all at once, I couldn’t help but feel a little sympathy for Miss Spears. And I have a feeling I wasn’t alone. We all probably related to her a little bit that night. Parental lock-down. Relationship melt-down. Perseverance and kicking ass nonetheless.

When the MC had said that this was a freak show, I didn’t think one could limit that to what was on stage. The best performances integrate the audience, usually in crafty irony. A lot of us know we are freaks of nature. And for those who feel they are not I can only feel pity, life must be insufferably predictable.

So in dancing and screaming her name, we all celebrated a little bit of ourselves that night. The luckiest of us are freaks and performers. You want a piece of me?

Gilgamesh

We shot ourselves in the foot, I realised one day as I flicked through the timeless Epic of Gilgamesh. As homosexuals, constantly wrenching ourselves away from the influence and conventions of heterosexuality, we've landed flat on our faces in the same dull traps they have fallen into since time began - only for us the shoe simply does not fit. Our moisturised heels are swimming in standard issue caterpillar boots.

Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the oldest written story of our human race was a love written in the stars, free and pure. I assure you they did not worry about Proposition 8. Nor did Gilgamesh's mother, in Tablet I, have an epilepsy and send him to therapy after realising the destiny of her royal son lies with another man.

True, such great journeys and epic adventures as seen through the eyes of Gilgamesh rarely materialise in our physical world today, but it is not too difficult to see (and some enthusiasts of the esoteric may even wish you to believe that) the monsters and the journeys in Gilgamesh's tale could also be demons and journeys you conquer within yourself.

But hey, who has time for profound connections and spiritual voyages with true love if we're too busy fighting for the hypotheses of gay marriage and test-tube babies? Why do we buy into simulating heterosexual relationships with all their ideosyncracies and force-transcribe them as our own? From the ring on your finger to the debate on monogamy, its tiresome and in most cases irrelevant.

I owe the freedom in my life to many an activist before me who has fought for what I deserve as a homosexual - equality of treatment. But often we lose sight of this, confuse equality with immitation.

In my tenacity to numerical explanations: if everyone aspires to be society's perfect 10 (accepted, respected, etc), heterosexuals usually achieve this through a simple 5+5. Yes, 5+5 gives you a perfect 10, but so does 2+8, or 6+4, and it is up to those of us who arrive at the perfect 10 from different variations to prove the obvious - that we are equally worthy. But instead, what we consistently pursue are the traditional "5+5" societal institutions, such as marriage and procreation, partly because the standards have been embedded in our brains and partly because we want the ligitimacy and respect that they entail.

Our mission, if one exists, should be to ensure we are equally acknowledged and respected regardless of how it is we conduct our lives so long as we follow our heart, and not to seek equality through immitation.