Please, Blue Fairy, Make Me a Real Boy . . .

I had a new experience today. For the first time ever, I felt like a real person. Shortly, I will fritter away a few words trying to explain what I mean by that, but all I can really say is that it occurred to me in a flash: "I feel like a real person." Now to the vain elaboration:

I went dancing with my friend Aneissa tonight. For no perceptible reason, other than that I was possessed by the vengeful spirit of Mario Lanza, I decided to wear tuxedo pants, a lavender shirt, a jade necklace, and a bright purple cumberbund. Perhaps where you live, gentle reader, this ensemble is haute couture, but allow me to inform you that I have never seen anyone in Colorado wear a cumberbund except with a complete tuxedo, and then only if everyone else is wearing them also. So there I am, dancing like I don't care what anybody thinks but secretly caring a little, and wearing a cumberbund. All around me, people are stepping directly from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog into the club, and I am dancing a rip into in the fabric of the social conspiracy, a complete anomaly. But this is not the epiphany, merely the frame for it.

I drove through Del Taco on the way home, and the moon was so beautiful when I arrived home at 2:00 that I set up a lawn chair in the backyard and spent a half-hour admiring it, solemnly eating my tacos. It was then that it occurred to me that I am "A Real Boy," a la Pinnochio. And as soon as it arrived, the feeling vanished. I suppose this is simply the experience which in Zen Buddhism is called "Being Present in the Moment," but it felt to me like I was, for the first time, inventing my experience. I had experiences tonight that came entirely from my deeper, smarter, interior self with no perceptible outside source. Who sits on the lawn in freezing weather and eats tacos, admiring the moon? Only one person. That moment was a pure expression of my real self. I cannot stress to you enough the elation that accompanied the moment. I exist after all. I do. I am not simply a volitionless product of my circumstances, there is an I who erupts from the larger, less concrete realm he inhabits and bleeds love and joy into the world I share with you, cherished reader. And it is our privilege to have met him.