Q: What Goes Around...

It's funny how kids want to be older - to stay up late, to see movies unsupervised, to eat as many cookies as their father eats.

It's funny how we reach a point where the weight of that desire flips to the opposite side of the scale and we start looking back like we just drove past our destination in a car that refuses to stop.

Luckily I was a child with two older siblings, which provided some of the advantages earned by kids a couple years older while I was still struggling to pronounce the letter R correctly. But I made up for it by being a hilarious little brother. Thanks, guys.

10 years ago, I thought adulthood would be a lousy way to lose the excitement and adventurous freedom of youth. Who would be there to assemble the mind-blowingly complex LEGO inventions that only an imaginative kid can create? Who's gonna tap into the unlimited possibilities inside that Bob Ross paint set that I never did open? My Dad loved hearing my qualms with growing up, always ready to interject with a number of reasons why getting older is the shit! He was so right. And the best part is we're all learning to be sort of Benjamin Button-like in our own ways, realizing Age and Aliveness are not destined to cancel each other out. We're As Young As We Feel We Are.

Sounds like this is the part where I advertise some new age-eliminating milkshake and how it's helped me keep my childlike physique over the years. "And Still Eat All The Carbs You Crave!" But this is all I have to show you...

A: Comes Around (wind permitting)

I originally started writing this entry to mention the awesome ways the world has been replenishing the things I've let fly over the years. It's like being handed a dollar bill upon which you wrote your name in red ink ten years earlier, to find that someone along its journey added the word "sucks", which someone else crossed off and replaced with an arrow that points to George Washington's newly-bearded face. What was at one time only an ordinary dollar bill is now a piece of art, and the very first vote in your favor should you ever grow a beard and run for president. You can't put a price on that.

One of my favorite people on the west coast says, "You meet someone, then you meet them again," encouraging me to trust the full-circleness of all things, that even missed opportunities and unfinished conversations will have a place down the line. And also to remind me to make an honest connection with everyone I meet, for they may be my greatest friend, supporter, or Love interest when we reconnect at some distant mark on our timeline.

This very afternoon, a crazy thing happened. Heading south on Highland Ave, Los Angeles, in the final second before putting on his shades and concealing his face, I recognized someone I'd met 5 years ago, and only in upstate NY. And there he was walking into a restaurant 2,500 miles from NY, in a city of nearly 4 million people, the exact second I was passing by. Sure, it wasn't some monumental reunion of a dear friend or rendezvous with Elvis, but to me this stuff is on par with glitches in the matrix and malfunctions in the lucid dream. I'm always left mystified. Over 6 billion people on Earth yet I find proof everyday to see that we're all just part of one big neighborhood. It's a small world, after all. And I am so thankful for the eight of you in the universe right now reading these elaborate run on sentences broadcasting my constant state of awe atop this revolving planet. You empower these words to live beyond the pages of a dust-collecting notebook. Who knows, maybe in ten years we'll meet up and laugh about how long-winded and tangential my writing used to be, or how I used to be such a good guy before the millions of readers eventually went to my head, or the way some billionaire invested in my brother's videogames and my father's best-selling novels after finding their links on Immaculate Miraculous. "Stranger things have happened both before and after noon." -Anthony Kiedis

To: Life - my foam boomerang,

I want to throw you as hard as I possibly can

so we'll know all the world when I see you again

And tell that girl with the pigtails to watch it, she's really gonna hurt someone.

Alive and amazed, no matter what age.

See you again.

Ryan Dilmore