Portals

I began a rough draft of a post about my previous post about "passing" as straight the other night. That rough draft was deleted as it was even more obscure and tangential than my normally obscure and tangential thought process. But I do have some further thoughts on this encounter with this woman named Abby, which may or may not be any clearer.

By itself, passing as straight is not that extraordinary. The reason why this interaction resonated with me is that was a very strong example of a phenomenon that has reared it's head in my life. I really don't have the words to describe this phenomenon other that to say that over the past month or so I have had a few of these experiences where it feels like I am in a "portal" to another human's life, as experienced through my eyes and consciousness.

Yea, yea, I know shades of "Being John Malkovich". But the strange feeling I experience when this has happened has been quite profound.

In the interaction with Abby it "felt" like I was a typical "guy" flirting with her flirty comments. My comments to her were not fake or disingenuous, in fact they were quite natural. It felt like I was in the interaction, but the experience was not part of "my life story"...almost as if I had walked onto the set of a film and I was acting a part...

Just a few evenings previous to this, I was passing a nearly empty bar around the corner from my apartment. Looking through the front door I saw an older man who was sitting at a barstool with his back to me (so I wasn't even seeing his face). In the moment I saw this man, a thought zoomed into my head..."Oh! there's my dad...This is the bar where I was supposed to meet him for a drink"...and then I felt this strong compulsion to go in the bar and interact with my "Dad".

Other than having gray hair, the man bore no physical resemblance to my dad. Couple that with the fact that my dad has never had an alcoholic beverage in his life and that makes for a very strange scenario. With this experience I again felt like it was a "scene" from someone else's life that I had, somehow, inadvertently stepped into.

I guess the easy psychological analysis of this phenomenon would be that I subconsciously "want" these experiences to be true... that I have unresolved feelings about my sexuality, about my relationship with my father, about my relationship with cocktails. etc, etc...

Normally I love easy psychological analysis, but I swear that has nothing to do with the intensity that I experienced in association with these vignettes. I believe that in most social interactions we all present "personas" to the world. Most times these personas are true representations of differing facets of our personality...but in these experiences, not only was it not my "mask" that I was showing the world...it was a different body, mind and spirit as well.

...Boy, I am glad I cleared that up!