Madly in Love...
Romeo and Juliet were barely past puberty, like, awfully young teenaged horndogs, is all I’m sayin’...
I haven’t felt madly in love for a long time. This might sound tragic to someone who has never been madly in love, suffered through it and survived it, and nearly been destroyed by it. And it’s NOT to say I’m not “in love” because I have been many times and am now still, one last time. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you should always put the emphasis in the phrase “madly in love” firmly on the mad part. And here’s even worse news: The whole “in love” thing is total bullshit, a massive lie you tell yourself in order to justify your idiotic acting-out behavior expressed in total obedience to a hormonal shift in yer reproductive messaging system. I’m not going to talk about biology here, because I don’t know all that much about it: pituitary glands, reptilian brain parts/farts, dopamine and etc. but I can assure you, based on numerous first-hand experiences that the madness that comes with in-love-ness is based solely on sexual attraction, at least for the guy. You girls/women, well, you’re on your own regarding these matters, but I suspect that if you were to ask a woman about all the secrets of her history of mad love, and if she had a lick of sense, and even a little bit of life experience, she’d confirm that what I’m saying for guys is pretty much true for women, too. Anna Karenina didn’t throw herself under that train because she was madly in love; she did it because madly in love had destroyed her life and she had no options left. Woody Allen can exclaim all he wants that his girlfriend’s 14-year-old adopted daughter was/is the great love of his life and I suppose it could be true, but I personally don’t believe it for a second. What does an old man see/love in the middle aged-woman sitting across from him, with whom he once fell madly in love when she was a teen and he was already an old man? Does he still have her wear a prep-school pleated skirt or cheerleader outfit? If this sounds cynical, so be it. I don’t mean it that way. It simply feels true to me. Love can be all kinds of things including insane, but the insanity of “madly in love!” is short-lived; and if you doubt this just walk through any mall or grocery store or any public place where couples in their thirties or older are walking together and look at them; how many are holding hands? Shutting out the world? Appear to be chomping at the bit to hit the sack? How many look madly in love? I rest my case.
Just Two of the Many Reasons I Stopped F**king Her . . .*
There are myriad reasons why relationships end but most often either I’m the crazy one . . . or SHE is . . .
Beating My Dog My girlfriend and I were fighting When More or less Out of the blue She said “If you want to fuck my sister It’s okay So long as you wait Awhile After we break-up.” “I don’t want to break-up,” I said, “and even if we did, I wouldn’t fuck your sister.” (Although in fairness and truth the idea HAD occurred to me a time or two) She didn’t believe me. So I said, “No, I’ve not stopped not Beating my dog.” But she didn’t laugh.
Reassurance
“I love you,” she said “and I need you to know How hard it is for me That John is attracted to me, And I’ve told him That you’re my lover And that I love you VERY MUCH. “He just needs a place to be ’cause he’s only got a few friends And I’ve told him that Even though it makes him Uncomfortable When he feels that you Don’t want him around all the time That I’m not gonna take care of him, That he’ll just have to talk to you About it himself. “And really, I love you too much to end my Relationship with John ’cause that’d be SOOOOOO Unhealthy for me to do that And if you and I can’t be healthier Than THAT, We’re never going to make it Right? “And so that’s why I phoned John Earlier tonight And asked him to come over. So that We could talk about all of this — And that’s why we were sitting there On the couch together When you happened to show up. “I feel a lot better, I mean cleaner and all,” she said, “I just hope you Know how much I LOVE you!” And I said, “Uh-huh.” And she smiled. (parenthetical side note, the “John” in the above poem used to play gentle guitar and was in love with her and eventually killed himself.)
Nympho
Most American boys of my generation were taught that the holy grail of girls were “nymphos,” not as girl friends, of course, but for repeated durable use & abuse, I’m afraid.
She probably wasn’t really a diagnosable “Nymphomaniac” in some kind of formal American Psychiatric type of definition (if such a diagnosis even exists) But she fit the label close enough for me. The catch is, if a guy fucks every woman he can, every chance he gets, there doesn’t really seem to be any name for him, unless he’s a Congressman and his wife or the tabloids catch him, in which case he’s a “sex addict.” However, if a woman wants to have sex a lot or “too much” and by too much we mean that she enjoys it for herself, feels pleasure and wants it and goes out and gets it, of course she’s crazy and the established order of patriarchal power laments the falling out of favor of frontal lobotomies. My nympho friend had a significant overbite kind of like buck-teeth, and her former husband, the father of her two kids, had anally raped her on their wedding night — in her case/their case, a move that turned out to be a suboptimal approach to connubial bliss. So when she and I had sex, many years after their divorce, I was never sure if she considered why she peed all over me, or if she was conscious of covering her mouth with the back of her hand, hiding from me when she was on top as she moaned and reached orgasm after orgasm. Was she oblivious to these habits? I couldn’t tell if she was hiding her least attractive feature or feeling shame at how much she enjoyed what we were doing? And looking back now, all these many years later, I realize that if she hadn’t been fucking some other guy when I wasn’t around every chance she got (Him being a macho jerk who threw around phrases like, “My word is my bond — ”) if she hadn’t been fucking him too, I doubt this whole nympho thing would have ever been an issue for me. In fact, looking back on it now, I’m just glad she and I got together for a while. And to be honest, I’m equally glad that we later went our separate ways. Both those sentiments being true also, I don’t regret having found her, a rare holy grail. And I got no hard feelings.
Love Poem
The other morning I was writing caustic and witty lines Slamming the small and larger horrors Of the world, When suddenly My fingers typed The loveliest Love poem I’ve ever written.
Fingers, Heart, Smile, Hope, but most of all, Love.
Rhonda, Maybe
A story about sex and race and $$ and trust and large, leaking breasts full of milk . . .
Rhonda is not her real name and I feel bad that I don’t remember it, but then I’m getting to an age where I forget a lot of people’s names. She is the only woman of African-American ancestry with whom I ever made love/had sex (I’m at a loss to say with certainty, how much of each ingredient went into what we were doing, at least for me.) I was twenty years older than her and she clearly had to talk herself into going to bed with me; my efforts at persuasion wouldn’t have made it work without her finally chipping-in. Her skin was dark and beautiful, her features pretty. And she was still nursing her toddler (Andrew was his name) that another white guy, long gone by the time I met her, had fathered. Her breasts were large and as we did it they began to leak heavily. I found it off-putting in a gross, sexist way — and this even though, I’ve always been a boobs man. Come to think of it she was also the first and only nursing mother I recall ever being with, or at least the first and only one who had such a wet reaction. We were together just a few weeks. I was a loser poet, not much $ to speak of, and she was writing half-hour ‘scripts’ for future episodes of Star Trek even though the show had been cancelled years before and there didn’t appear, back then, to be any big screen stuff coming (in other words, she was nuts). A few weeks, after we’d parted ways, a break-up without any drama and absent much discussion about it, she phoned me one evening out of the blue, and asked if I’d give her my Visa card number so she could pay for a pizza for Andrew and her, their dinner that night. I hesitated a little and finally asked that she only use the card for just that one purchase. She promised she would. So I gave her the number. She was a poor single mom alone in the world with her half-white baby, and we had broken-up shortly after that afternoon when I’d nearly drowned in her leaking breast milk, so she had, in many ways, to my liberal mind, every right to seek direct reparations in an immediate manner. After all, my family, on my dad’s side, were proud white Alabamans. So, again, I gave her my credit card #. The days passed, turning to weeks and months; I never heard from her again. And she never made another charge to my credit card. If I look back on this with some surprise at her keeping her word does that make me racist? If you were surprised when this story ended the way it did, does that make you racist? Does my starting all of this by identifying Rhonda by race say anything? I mean, was her race of any consequence/importance/significance to the rest of what happened? Does my not even remembering her real name matter? I don’t know if ‘we’ (our nation/community/world) have a long ways to go when it comes to racial equality and seeing ‘others’ fairly . . . . . . But I’m pretty sure that I still do.
Two Antithetical Views of Sex/Love (or are they?)
Although there are quite a few other matters to consider re: human sexuality, here’re a pair that we don’t see matched-up too often . . .
1.
Ever wonder how so many pretty women end up in the most extreme XXX porn, getting abused in humiliating and painful ways and trying to look turned-on and happy about it?
Truly I don’t get it.
Maybe they’re thinking, “Well, it’s show biz, you know, and I’m an actress, after all. . . and what the hell, it’s steady work.” But if that’s their thought I always wonder, how did they get there from where ever it was they started?
2.
Him: “Want me to pull yer hair?”
Her: “Sure, go ahead and try it.”
Him: “What’ll happen?”
Her: “You’ll get a knuckle sandwich!”
Romance, married style.
Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash
