My Nature

I don’t much like the color green. I especially don’t like olive. But I love my bike, and one of the things I love most is its color, which is olive green. Today – and surely this will change – I can’t imagine wanting a bike of a different color.

I’m not attracted to skinny women. Yet, I’m infatuated at the moment with a woman I chat with mornings in the coffee shop, and who is quite slim.

I don’t relate to the ritual or the strict guidance of religion, but I find prayer to be a sublime act, and I once took communion during a Catholic Mass (I’m not Catholic in any way) and felt spiritually renewed by the act.

Cars don’t much appeal to me, but I love to drive.

I regularly proclaim that I love all kinds of music, except country, opera and heavy metal. And yet, particular arias have moved me to tears, I love the way KD Lang spins a ballad – or Patsy Cline, for that matter – and I once, unintentionally, saw AC/DC in concert, and was blown away by their gut-pumping soul.

I don’t like my food on sticks or skewers, unless it happens to be souvlaki.

I hate lies and deception, but I love secrets

The public coldness of Toronto I find sad and disappointing; and I love cities where people speak to strangers on street corners and in elevators. But it annoys the hell out of me when people have loud conversations about their business on the bus.

So does it matter that I say what I like and what I don’t? Do I really even know?

And how will it go, when I’m confronted by that next experience that I’ve ruled out in advance?

Or face that objectionable person that I already disapprove.

Are my rules and definitions of myself such fragile constructs? Or just part of a game of dress-up, by which I cloak my broader nature?

I carry fear of so many things, and yet I exist in this world.