To Love and To Be Loved

I saw a guy on the beach yesterday smoking a cigar while getting his fishing rod ready to cast a line into the sea. He looked like a smug Stanley Tucci character in some Meryl Streep movie you’re just too goddamn lazy to switch off. But who knows, maybe he’s actually a nice guy in real life and I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

Either way, this Tucci fellow, in order to relax, and/or feel more like a real man, was willfully pulling cancerous smoke into his body while trying to kill innocent beings for the sheer joy of it. And as I walked past him, I thought of a Facebook memory that popped up for me earlier in the day. It was a screenshot of something I wrote (just in my head at first) while walking along a beach up north on Long Island a few years earlier.

“Humanity will amount to nothing more than a murderous and suicidal plague on the Earth’s surface until the love of love transcends the love of money.”

But in this case you can swap out “selfishness” for “money” because really, whats the fucking difference?

Thankfully though, while I was reading at a park later that day, I saw a monster of a guy, with huge tattooed arms and a menacing beard, wearing one of those front facing knapsack things and inside of it was the most adorable little baby girl you’ve ever seen wearing a perfectly pink little hat. And. He. Just. Loved. Her.

I waved to her and said in the voice I reserve for toddlers and kittens and puppies, “Hello little one! I love your hat.”

And then I looked up to him and said, sans puppy voice, “Hey man, she’s sooo cute.”

He smiled genuinely through his beard of fury and then gave me the most sincere, “Thanks so much man.”

And this, right here, proves the point I’ve been making since the beginning:

Underneath all of humanity’s bullshit, we really just want to love and to be loved. It’s our instinct. It’s our reflex.

You see the toughest looking guys wanting to hold their girlfriend’s hands. Then there’s this Wolverine dude in the park yesterday adjusting his baby’s pink hat to keep the sun out of her eyes. And you always always always hear about people jumping into freezing waters to save absolute strangers from their certain deaths.

Hmm, maybe I’ve been wrong about something all along. I always say that we need to evolve to the point where kindness becomes our set-point if we hope to survive, but maybe it’s actually the opposite.

Maybe we need to devolve instead of evolve. Devolve to our instincts. Our instinct to love. To love all people, fish and everything in between as if they were ourselves.

So, with all of that said, thank you once again for trading your time to read my words and thank you even more for considering them.

And since it’s almost Halloween, here’s a photo of me dressed as Batman. With vampire teeth of course.

What I Like With My Morning Coffee..

In between sips today, I saw this:

“We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” – C.S. Lewis

That’s exactly it.

Because I, maybe like you, feel a constant longing. A homesickness. A homesickness for a moment that is, well, more real than this current one. A moment that I don’t feel like I’m waiting for something better to come along. And when I turn away from social media and submerge myself in beauty, either as the fully abiding witness or the creator through the means of what seems like divine design, it feels, well, more real.

Like it’s Thanksgiving. And I’m walking into the house I grew up in for the first time in a long time and everyone’s home and happy to see me.

P.S. I am actually drinking coffee in this photo because I hate it in movies or on TV shows when the cups are so obviously empty.