Love Comes Softly in the Night, Like Your Drunken Uncle
I’ve been thinking about love a lot lately, possibly because I’m in the enviable position of not currently being in it. Equally likely is that I’m starting to obsess about it because I live in a car and don’t have the first clue what I’d do with it if I had it.
Unfortunately, I’m almost in love all the time. I spend a lot of time in the company of awesome woman, because I myself am also awesome. Being almost in love generally isn’t a problem, but it requires maintenance. It’s a lot like herpes. The key thing to watch for is love sneaking up on you when you’re weak.
In the car, the weak times are at night if I’m not quite tired enough to sleep, and those liminal half-asleep places I find myself in over and over. These are the times when love comes tapping at my window like a sparrow, or a parking enforcement officer. Sometimes, when it’s really desperate, my mind does a little tour of women I’m attracted to but with whom any attempt at anything would be an extremely bad idea. Crossing-the-streams bad. Not bad in a legal sense, but in just about every other, including electromagnetic. My mind is a whore.
My technique for dealing with love when it sneaks up is pretty simple, but difficult to describe correctly, so consider this description metaphorical. Actually, go ahead and consider it to be delicately yet intricately metaphorical, full of subtle beauty and strong lines. That’s probably the way to go.
When love sees me in quiet repose in my Toyota, and pads over softly like an innocent fawn, when love looks at me with ancient eyes full of promise and hope and a little pain and offers it all to me, I grab that fucker by the throat and beat the everloving shit out of it. I beat it like there’s candy inside. I beat it like it kicked my dog, and then I send it out into the street broken and bloody and stupid. That’s love.
As a rule, I like being in love - I just don’t think I can do it right now. It’d be like trying to drive a car that’s being rebuilt. The transmission is still hanging in the tree. Maybe it’s been so long that I’m a little intimated by it. Maybe I just want to make sure it’s right. Maybe not, maybe I just want to fuck it up a few times really quick.
Sex is another matter entirely. There’s no reason sex should give me so much trouble. I mean, I know several people - stupid, stupid ugly people - who have all the sex they want. This is why prostitution should be legal: I would like to remember what it’s like to touch a woman, and somewhere out there a mother needs to buy her baby formula. That sounds like a win-win to me.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:34 pm
I’d like to add - “Beat it like it owes you money”
Know what I do when I’m feeling down and want desperately to dampen the springs of love? - I build an Excel spreadsheet and fill it with all the women I’ve “had” … then, at my fancy, I like to sort it alphabetically, then chronologically, and sometimes I (be)rate them, and list them in order of efficiency and concierge.
…
And sometimes it’s fun to have sex amidst the plump boxes of Pampers and so many discarded Virginia Slims cartons.
September 21st, 2006 at 5:41 pm
P.S. I don’t think my uncle was drunk.
September 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 am
I do the same thing, except instead of an Excel spreadsheet I use my fingers. That way I can still play Zuma with my free hand.
P.S: That wasn’t your uncle.