Love.
Such a blithingly dismal thing isn’t it? It’s not apparent from the offset why some human beings tend to love one another, and why some don’t. To a Martian, traveling at speeds of hundreds of millions of light-years per second, love might not seem like a valid option. Perhaps, due to some sort of extraordinary evolution in their physical and mental psyche, love was abandoned long ago in the pursuit of more technologically superior options of masochism. When a human being is young, love seems like the only thing that matters in the world. Then, as a human being matures in age and in mind, love seems like an unachievable prospect. Love is something so undefinable and so mysterious that it seems almost impossible to live in a life of love. There is a reason why the old guard often tends to refer to love as the madness of youth.
The phenomenon of love is so common amongst human beings, that our best resident philosophers, thinkers, writers, poets, entertainers, and celebrities, all have something to say on the subject. But no one in the world can, has, or will ever define what it actually is. Relationship advice columns and blogs are sought after commodities in the world of new media, citing antiquated sources like Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. What the authors of these sites don't tell you is that if love were to ever be properly defined, they would all be out of a job. And so, entertainers, writers, authors, poets and singers, and the like have resolved not to ever pursue the definition of love, but merely their take on what you should do with it. The best answer that has ever been given is by the Galactic Emperor Dath Kall whilst taking a stay cation on his home planet of Koriban: "Put your love somewhere that the sun does not shine, and let it stay there." But more peacefully motivated celebrity personalities in THIS galaxy, like John Lennon, of the Beatles, write that love is all you need.
I would have to disagree. For without a decent supply of air to breathe, human beings would not be able to practice the art form of love. Without food, the same outcome applies. Without clean water, bedsheets, little brown things that we put on our feet to make ourselves feel tall, or little things we hold in our hands with lead tips to compose thoughts and ideas, we, as a species, would not have the capacity for love in the way that we think of it today. Certainly we as a species would be extinct without the large canvas squares - with lines and splotches and slashes run across them in untasteful patterns of color - that we put on the walls of our offices and condominiums to make ourselves feel better about our collective metaphysical existences, and to stave off the perfectly normal paranoid delusions that the world might just one day end, without so much to show for it as a lousy bumper sticker sold on Saturdays in an open-air market on Mars that reads “Earth, mostly harmless. Nice while it lasted. But insanely dull and infinitesimal in its dislike of human beings.”
Like the leaves on a Maple tree, love can turn. Shrivel up, turn brown, and fall to the ground. Only to be stepped upon by the foot of a very ambitious, innocent, life-loving young female qugalplax who absolutely adores music performed by the skull-cracking, mind-bogglingly untalented likes of a band that comes from the desolate wasteland which is the planet Schmall, in the Xenon Quadrant, where mayonnaise is the most common table condiment - much like Canada. Love can become something ugly, bitter, sour. Love can become a man’s worst nightmare. Love can eat away at your soul. Love can make you toss and turn at night and wake up shouting. Love can give you nightmares, and flashbacks. Love can become a man’s narcotic. And this narcotic… it’s more addicting than the hardest man-made drug on earth. More addicting than alcohol, heroin, meth, marijuana, tobacco, THC, or krokodil. And when it is taken away from a man, the man will do anything to get it back. But when the man knows that there is no possibility to ever get it back, he will go through the most violent withdrawal that anyone has ever seen. Ever. I know how this guy feels.
And not a moment too soon, there goes the proverbial neighborhood.
Love is quite possibly the most confusing thing in the universe. Quite possibly the most confusing thing in all of time itself. More confusing than life, the universe, and everything, to take a page out of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. More confusing, definitely, than the bioanatomical bone density scan readout of a fully-grown Mountain Troll from Sussex. And most assuredly more confusing than a devious Leprechaun that I met one evening on a drunken stroll outside of a Gallway pub-meeting of the Continuity IRA's High Command. Love is quite possibly the most confusing thing in the whole of the multi-verse, and in all of its dimensions in every time that ever was, will be, is, or -in certain particular parallel realities- never was at all. Try wrapping your brain around that.
Or, better yet, don't try... you might get the carpeting wrong and the whole world will collapse in upon itself like a bad dream.
The most respectable philosophers in all of history have resolved that love, quite frankly, is something not to be approached in any way whatsoever. In fact, the only decent love that a man or woman might have in this mortal existence, is the love of a superior and ultimate being of which there exists no physical proof of his existence. Only faith. In this way, philosophers have realized that love is something not entirely dangerous to the soul of the individual, because that in which the man or woman has given all of their soul and their love, can never betray them. If a human being wishes to love other human beings, then this human being might be so inclined to look up the definition of unconditional love. This philosophical ideology does not cover the likes of elves, goblins, or wiggloxes from the planet Benalley - for their pan dimensional existences do not conform to the same parameters of space and time as we human beings.
But in the confines of immaturity during our youth, we all make the mistake of falling in love with someone. This is utterly and most assuredly the stupidest mistake that anyone has ever made, ever. If you, my dear reader, are presently in the death-grip of love, I pray for you. You have wandered into a territory in which you know nothing. One in which I know nothing. A territory so vast and desolate that no human being knows anything in the form of direction or destination. Love is kind of like the vast deserts of Iraq, in the fact that it is constantly at war for no apparent reason, and that no one knows where the hell they are going. Or, more appropriately, the planet Dune, because everyone is trying to get a piece of it.
If you have come to the rationalization that love is something unavoidable, don’t try to avoid it at all. This is probably a moment in your life when love is what you need. If you try to avoid your destiny, it will only bite you in the ass and leave your chops to the alligators later on down the road. But, if you have the opportunity to avoid falling in love, I suggest following this path.
You will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
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