Sometimes I feel like we’ve been living in the future for the last 100 to 130 years. What I mean is, sometimes it seems like the real world ended sometime in the late nineteenth century, and everything since then has been an epilogue, or not quite real. At various times I feel like the real world ended with the invention of the light bulb, or with the beginning of World War I, or with expressionism or atonal music — that the world stopped making sense somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, and that nothing since then has been real: automobiles, movies, TV, radio, rock music, space travel, iPads.

Of course, every new technology has made the world seem different. One could just as easily say that the real world ended with the invention of the railroad, or with the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of cities, or the development of agriculture or the invention of writing. The last 5,000 to 10,000 years themselves could just be an epilogue to the vast human history that came before it. Perhaps ancient nomadic tribal society was the last “real” type of human existence.

That may be true, but there’s something about the light bulb to me that just seems different. It changed human existence not gradually but immediately and drastically. It robbed us of our regular circadian rhythms, and there must have been something magical about it. Or maybe I’m really thinking of electricity, not just the lightbulb? Maybe it was the telegraph that began to make the world seem unreal?

By “unreal,” I mean that electricity is something we can’t see. It’s something we can’t intuitively understand. Human beings can understand steam power, or mechanical power, or farming. But electricity? It seems like magic. I can’t even imagine how you’d explain the internet to Thomas Jefferson. And remember the first time you saw an iPhone? Remember how fucking awesome it was that you could zoom in on a website just by pinching it with your fingers? I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket and it still feels like magic.

Maybe that’s what I mean. We live in a world we don’t understand.

And yet… even the iPad is created out of materials that have existed for a few billion years. Yes, the materials have been mined and refined and chemically treated, and the architecture might be based on principles nobody understood until a few decades ago, but the raw materials themselves — the elements — have existed since the Earth finished forming. If we could somehow teleport an enormous group of human beings back in time a few thousand years — a group containing the right mix of people, including experts in every subject imaginable — they could probably recreate our modern conveniences, eventually. Some of them would know how to mine metal, some would know how to create electricity, and then electrical generators, and some would know how to create lathes, and so on. They could create the meta-tools needed to create the tools needed to create anything we have today. It couldn’t be done instantly, but it could be done.

Ultimately there is no “real” versus “un-real.” There was no golden age of the world. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been changing, and it always will change.

Sometimes the world I’m living in doesn’t feel real, but it is as real as I am. This world is weird, but I can laugh, and cry, and feel fear and happiness, and the littlest things can seem like the realest, most important things in the world to me.

As long as I am real, my world is real.

On the subway this morning a big freckled bicep stared at me. It was attached to a polo shirt tucked into a pair of black pinstriped dress pants. The owner’s hand was holding onto a metal bar, and as the car lurched and he tried to hold on, his arm flexed and the bicep turned into a tricep. I was trying to read a magazine article about Zen and psychoanalysis, but the arm was inches from my face and just an eye-dart away from the words I was trying to focus on. I didn’t even have to move my head to look. I couldn’t focus on the words.

Manhattan was filled with legs this weekend. Legs in shorts. Calf muscles narrowing into ankles and disappearing into sockless sneakers. The weather was beautiful. I spent chunks of Saturday and Sunday in Riverside Park, sitting on a bench, doing the crossword, reading a magazine, constantly distracted by attractive people — or at least by the hope of seeing them.

The eye is the most sexually stimulated organ. I see a hot guy and I

can’t…

stop…

staring.

I stare like I’m about to go into solitary confinement, like it’s the last hot guy I will ever see. I look away but then I have to look back.

You know the experiment where the rat keeps depressing a lever because it provides pleasure? It’s like that. My eyes just keep looking, as if looking were a series of discrete acts, little pulses of looking instead of a wave of vision. With each stare, my pupils dilate and I commit a crime.

Several years ago I was having a conversation with a friend in a restaurant and I couldn’t keep my eyes focused on him because hot people kept walking past and I kept staring at them. He finally called me on it. I was embarrassed but also kind of proud and tingly.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m like this because I spent so many years trying not to look, trying to will away my libido. Other times I wonder if I just have a high sex drive.

That doesn’t mean I want to have sex with every gay man I know. Just because I want to be friends with a guy doesn’t mean I want to have sex with him — even if I find him attractive. There’s a lot to be said for platonic friendships between gay men, and I’ve been trying to cultivate those lately.

I don’t have enough friends — people to do fun stuff with. I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs personality test a couple of times, and both times, I came out almost balanced between introverted and extroverted, albeit slightly more introverted than extroverted. Sometimes I see myself as a shy extrovert; I wish I had more people in my life, but I get hindered by fear.

As a gay man in a relationship, I sometimes find it difficult to cultivate friendships with other gay men. Sometimes I worry: does this person think I want to have sex with him? And sometimes I worry: do I want to have sex with him? Where’s the line between friendship and flirting, and between flirting and more? Flirting is fun, but straight guys don’t have to worry about flirting with their buddies.

How do I not act too aloof but also not act too come-hither? How do I telegraph the complexity of what I’m feeling when I can’t even grasp it myself?

This is why I shut down and don’t have enough of a social life.

Well, that, and I’m not good at making plans.

Ahhh, spring.

I lay on the grass in the Catskills on Friday night. The sky was dotted with an infinitude of stars. I hadn’t seen so many stars in – I can’t rememember when. I saw the faint band of the Milky Way. I saw a tiny white dot move slowly across the sky – a satellite. I love seeing satellites in the night sky – they’re so eerie.

Matt and I went with Mike and his roommate/our friend Dan up to Mike’s mom’s house in the Catskills on Friday. We ate dinners cooked by Dan, who is a gourmet cook. We watched about seven episodes of Arrested Development on DVD as well as most of Sunset Boulevard on Turner Classic Movies. Other than that, I mostly read and did crossword puzzles.

I had a sense of expansion this weekend. It’s possible to have space and quiet! Some people live that way year-round. If I lived like that, I bet I’d get a lot more writing done. A little house in the middle of nowhere with a writing room with unfinished wooden walls.

I spent several moments out in the yard by myself this weekend, just being. Every few minutes a vehicle would zoom past on the neighboring road. Other than that, it was dead quiet, except for the water flowing in the stream at the edge of the yard and the occasional breeze blowing through the trees.

It was heaven.

Early yesterday afternoon I stood by the stream and just stared at the water and at the opposite bank. I can do that sometimes – I can just sit or stand somewhere for minutes on end and drift off into a reverie. “What are you doing, Jeff?” someone might ask. And the answer will be that I’m thinking. Just thinking.

I thought about nature and about Native Americans, and about what the land was like before electricity and before log cabins and any permanent settlements. I imagined how quiet and peaceful the world used to be without any people on it, without any words or language. I stared at the trees and and water and rocks and tried to imagine myself pre-verbal. Language leads to thoughts and intelligence, which make us feel separate from nature. But we and the trees and the dirt come from the same stuff.

When we die we will decompose and rejoin the earth, and we will be silent again.