Remember that wonder at the first time you saw a beautiful man fly through the air on the trapeze?  Can you remember, fondly,  those first stirrings of lust you felt when you saw scantily clad dancers vamp seductively? Remember those real fears that emerged when that clown looked you in the eye and smiled? Oh yes, the circus.

There’s just one more week to catch the freak circus, my friends. You may have seen the giant red and white circus tent in the Los Angeles State Historic Park near Chinatown for the better part of the summer.  Know that inside is a dark wonderland of acrobats, dancers, ghosts and strongmen.  Cirque Berzerk is your opportunity to indulge that inner juvenile delinquent, and run away to join the dirty circus. This show’s definitely intended for mature audiences, leave the kids at home. I mean, unless they are teenagers and into that sort of thing.

They have shows Thursday through Sunday (8/6-8/9), and this weekend is the last weekend of the season. Last year I got to see them on the last weekend of their run, and it was epic and it was sold out. I suggest getting your tickets in advance at their website (www.cirqueberzerk.com).

Plan a whole creepy circus evening of it. You can pack a picnic and gather around the park. Dress up and get involved! When you start seeing the massive flame cannons, the show is about to begin.  You can party with the fantastic carnie band Vaud and the Villains in the Booze Tent.  Stay after the show and dance with the cast. They keep the second tent open until pretty late and it becomes a hopping little party in it’s own right. It’s a magical show, they do it right.

There’s this underlying shame about online dating that women sometimes share. I think it has to do with the online dating experience that most pretty girls end up having on dating sites. They are the victims of these online “cat-calls” from men and their mailboxes are filled with messages that are either inappropriate or offensive.

What  works for me is to be totally and 100 percent real with what I put out there in my profile. I want to show who I am. Sure, I choose the most flattering pictures, but they are current. Sure, I try and try and sound intelligent, but I am being truthful. Whenever I meet someone in person, any lies are going to show right up. In person is the reason we are doing this, remember?

When I send out messages to girls, I like to comment on their profile and try and find some common ground. I always, no matter what, write a new message to each girl. It’s also really important to not get discouraged as a man, lest you become a jerk. These women are getting so many messages, they may not be responding because they have a full inbox, or they just gave up on the site. I’ve heard some girls say that they get hundreds of messages a week. Wild! The ratio of messages sent to messages received back means I am doing a lot of work and getting very little return.

Have fun and play!

One of the things I have learned, in my last couple of years as a single man is that it’s important to love without attachment. This is not to say that I am ready to bolt right out the door. No, I am about loving fully without being attached to a result (like sex, relationship, or my “list”).

By giving up that there has to be some kind of outcome, I am able to be fully here in the now with the woman I am dating. I am able to just “be on a date” without focusing on my strategies for getting what I want.

But then there is the loving part. I find that part of the reason men are confronted by the word “love” is that they have been burned loving in the past. In the ongoing process of letting go of that pain from previous rejections, I can find myself loving fully, even someone I’ve just met.  Not crazy stalker love, but a calm, peaceful, human love.

I’m not attached to it going anywhere other than right here, anyway.

I noticed two things that came out of our new White House. Both hold the secrets of the universe.  Both I think are steps in the right direction for arguably the most powerful man in the world.

The first is this photo.

Holy smokes!  Our president is sitting alongside a pirate, negotiating. It’s so simple. So weird. They staged the photo for a correspondents dinner. He was making a joke about negotiating with pirates. Brilliant. Playful.  Turns out that it’s Obama’s speech writer dressed as the pirate. I like that he just had that lying around somewhere.

Geeks.

The second is this video.

Now this shows the white house press secretary Robert Gibbs pretty upset about some phones going off during his press conference. While I am surprised at the rudeness of professional reporters leaving on their phones during a televised anything, I think that the way he handles this, with play is actually pretty cool.

Our government is, for the first time in my lifetime behaving like real people do, in business, with families, with friends. It is an exciting time.

My belief is that we will not win any friends in the world by trying to intimidate them. We will never get out of our financial mess by making people afraid. We will never solve all of our worlds problems by being serious and stern.

We must play to find the answer.

So,  a few months ago, I decided to move my blogging into a more public forum.  Tribe.net was a safe haven for my ideas, but their inherent slowness and unreliability had me seek other things. But to get my blog out to the most friends, I had to use Facebook, which is tied to my real name. Now this is a problem if in your head, you are this underground freedom fighter. Because the evil forces of evilness are always going to want to link back to you and your loved ones. I read Spiderman, you gotta have a secret identity.

And then there is the possibility of really making a difference.  That is going to come from transparency and acceptance of who you are. That kind of power is going to come from taking full responsibility, radical accountability for your actions and your words.  There is standing for something.  I’m not saying that this is the most important blog on the internets or something. I’m just saying that it’s me.

We are living at the end of the industrial age. The internet has given us a voice. It is millions of voices, talking right back to mainstream media. In the last age, communication was a top down, lord to serf kind of relationship.  TV, News, Magazines, Books… they all came to us and we did nothing but listen. It had been that way for as long as these technologies have existed. Media has always been the world of elites. It has also been the most effective way for agents of change and intelligence to get their word to the masses, at various rare points in history. The Internet made it possible for all. Anyone with a internet cafe can now change the world. Now, they joystick and the keyboard have given us a way to have a conversation back. Blogs and videogames, they are our access to taking control of the stories.

But, we must tell the stories to make the networked system work.  By decentralizing the communication sources, by making every man woman and child becomes an editor, newscaster, videographer,  humorist, eroticist, priest, magician, political pundit, distributor… and we become the voice. Honestly, if you have even thought about it, you MUST start putting your stuff on the web. get a wordpress.com blog. Open a facebook account, and link it to your videos on youtube. Twitter your whereabouts.  Post photos of yourself from your phone.  Find me and network yourself to me!

We cannot stop them from watching. The Genie is out of the bottle on surveillance. They can watch and read everything. They can link whatever we write to almost any email or IP address. But by the same token, we can’t stop them from masturbating while watching us either. As we flood the system with chaff, we become more invisible. In an age of reality TV, the only thing more cameras is going to achieve is to make me think I am even more a rockstar than I already know I am.

Networks communicate from every node. The radical thing I am suggesting is to tell everything. Be wholly yourself without reservation. Of course, that is easy for me, I work in Hollywood, and don’t have to answer to corporate masters. But ultimately, your corporate masters or the various tentacles of the American Law Enforcement Community will be able to find anything about you anyway. Wait until the tagging facial recognition software comes out for the public. Be smart out there, but express yourself fully and don’t hold back.

The system is in a state of upheaval right now, and everything is changing. It’s painful for the system too. Change is coming, and we are on the fast first wave.  Be free.

edit: this just in: naked pics of yourself can be trouble.