Definitions get us in shit.

Disclaimer:

I realize this is not the usual fare for my blog, but I’m complicated, bitches. Deal with it.

A couple weekends ago a good friend of mine got smashed at a party and stopped talking to everyone. I asked him what was up and he didn’t say anything. Something was wrong.

“Get up. We’re going outside. Get up. Come, let’s go.”

So we went outside.

“What’s up? What’s wrong?”

“It’s hard to tell you man. It’s hard.”

“Just tell me. What’s wrong?”

“It’s hard. I can’t tell you.”

“Come on, it’s me. Just tell me.”

Deep inhale, slow, slightly quivering exhale.

“It’s hard for me to believe that love exists.”

Why does the heavy shit always fall in my lap?

This seems to be the topic with the most buzz in my life at the moment, namely: The issues concerning the makeup and even existence of the much written about, highly sought after, and seemingly universal emotion that we reserve a velvet roped-off section in our lives for.

I miss the old days when I thought love was about always wanting to be with the other person, the slice of time in my life when it never crossed my mind that you could get sick of and off of love. Love is like smoking, the more you do it the more you crave it, but eventually, in the end, you die. Either you die from it, or you just buy the farm, so to speak. But damned if it isn’t the shit when you’re doing it, non? I’m not saying that love is a bad thing by analogizing by way of smoking, no, that’s not intentional. In fact, love is like life and we all know what life is:

Dfn: Life (n) Deadliest sexually transmitted disease. No one gets out alive.

But this is not about life, this is about love. And love is not just that, is it? It can’t be. Love isn’t just our bodies producing the chemicals it craves; love can’t merely be an addiction. There have been too many poems and stories and hopes and happily ever afters and piles dashed dreams spent on the issue of love for it to be reduced to a smoking analogy. Love is complicated and it’s necessarily so. Why? Well, because we are complicated. We are the only species on the planet (aside from these homosexual and lesbian Chinese monkeys I saw on the Discovery Channel) that mate for pleasure. Sex, for 99.9% of the fauna on the planet is purely for procreation purposes. You don’t see cows stopping at the Adults Only store on the way home from the field. (If you live in Newmarket, you might) They don’t complicate things like we do, they lust, they don’t love. But why? Some say it makes the sex better. Is this what love is? Eggs with Renzo spice? (If you don’t get it, ask me. You’ll thank me the next time you eat eggs) Is love just pleasuring each other physically? Letting someone rock the boat day in, day out, year after year? No, it’s not that, but it’s partly that.

I tend to go back and think about the things that I’ve learned. People say that everything you learn in high school is bullshit. I don’t know if that’s true. I think that the things you learn in the classes you take in high school are just limited in application because of the names on the doors. We are taught, “There is a time and place for everything, and knowing where Iran is will not help you in Calculus class” And that’s true, but school isn’t life, and the things you learn in one venue might fit in another perfectly.

Example: Health Class. We had a speaker come in and talk about drugs. A former crackhead turned spokesperson. She came in and talked to our class about the dangers of crack. Something she said always stuck with me. “Doing drugs is hating yourself. To live you need to love yourself. To love yourself you need to know what love is. I’m going to tell you right now what it is. It’s 4 things. Trust, Respect, Loyal, and Communication. If you lose one of these things you loose everything. If you don’t trust yourself, you won’t respect yourself. If you don’t respect yourself you won’t be loyal to yourself. If you aren’t loyal to yourself, you won’t communicated with yourself.” Don’t worry, this is not turning into a anti-drugs post.

Goddamned crackhead. She made no sense. But when I apply what she said to something else, say, the current topic, I can see what she’s saying. In love with another person if you don’t communicate with the other person you can’t trust them. If you can’t trust them you’ll lose respect for them. If you lose respect for them say bye-bye to loyalty. Another way: In love with another person if you aren’t loyal to the other person you won’t trust them either. If you don’t trust them you won’t respect them because you’ll feel they don’t deserve it. If you don’t respect them, why would you communicate those deeper feelings you have? Is this what love is? T-R-L-C, is this what love means to me? Does it matter that I got part of my understanding about what love is from a crackhead?

Maybe love is something beyond comprehension, maybe it’s something we’re not supposed to be dissecting. Maybe it’s like a magic trick, better to enjoy it, be bewildered by it, and in turn made hopeful because of it. Maybe it’s meant to be that way rather than fanning away the smoke and breaking all the mirrors. Maybe we should stop trying to define things; it’s the definitions that get us in shit. Maybe having an idea is worth more than having a hallmark card with a corporate, politically correct, board member A-O-K certified definition. Maybe when you start questioning the harder it is to just believe. Maybe.

Regardless of all this jibber jabbering, I’m sure none of you are better off for it. Maybe someone is. That would be great. But despite that though, love is real. It just is.