Romeo Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Love. In all shapes and sizes, colors and hues, romantic or platonic, love is a pain in the ass of enormous proportions. The bigger your ability to love, the more of yourself you give away. Love is never patient, usually not kind, but the biggest lie of all is that love will conquer all. Not so. Love conquers nothing. Love is the enemy. The battle lines are always drawn when love comes into the picture. Love is to be conquered. To be sublimated. To be caged and put in a zoo and never fed by the public at large. Love will bite the hand that feeds it and feed on the hand that reaches out to it.

Keep your hands out of love's cage. It is not to be trusted. It looks so idyllic when you first set your eyes upon it. It curls up around your ankles and purrs. It sits on your lap and swishes its tail as your stroke its silky coat. You feel so warm and fuzzy. Then one day, you turn your back for a minute and love sinks its sharp little teeth into your butt!

That's love.

Still, you feel that maybe it was your fault that this love was so panicky it had to grab onto you. Perhaps you made it feel threatened. You think maybe you could have been a bit kinder and gentler. So you aim to keep love happy and secure. And so love behaves, purrs, wags it's tail and uses the litter box at the appropriate times. You are so happy. You have love. Love has love. It's a win-win situation.

Until the day you feel those razor sharp love bites on your ass again. You turn around and look at your beloved love with the pain of betrayal in your eyes. Love can't stand to see you looking at it through the eyes of truth. So what does love do? It sweet talks you into believing it wasn't the one who bit you. YOU are the one who bit you.

"How can that be?" you say to love.

"I dunno. You're the one who did it", love says with a baffled shrug.

So you sit and puzzle over how you did such a terrible thing to yourself.

And you apologize to your love for thinking this erroneous thought about it.

Love forgives you. Because love never holds a grudge.

You fall into that false sense of security. You know in the deepest part of your brain cells that it is false. In the place where you are really you, the place you dare not go, you know that there is no security when you let love lead your life for you. Still, you sit back, love on your lap, swishing and purring; only leaving your presence for short trips to the poop box and all is well because love always trusts.

But one day, love stands up on your thigh. Out come the claws and it kneads your flesh. You ask love "what are you doing? Look, I'm bleeding!"

"I didn't do that", love says. "You're the one whose bleeding. Why look at me?"

And love jumps down from your bleeding thighs an sashays right on past the litter box and out the door - where there is another warm and inviting lap waiting, minus the disgusting blood.

You are left alone, bleeding and in pain. You cry. Infection sets in. It stinks up the joint. You sit in shocked stillness until someone comes along and gives you a shot of antoboitics.

It takes some time but you heal. You forget the pain. And you stop looking for love in all the wrong places.

Then one day you feel something warm and furry around your ankles. So begins another terrifying bout of love...

If At First You Don't Succeed, Eat Cake!!

One way to guarantee your children grow up to be joyful underachievers is to be that way yourself. The other way is to do everything for them. My parents taught by example. They weren’t the kind to do everything for me. If I didn’t do it for myself, it didn’t get done. And that was alright.

I was raised by a family whose philosophy about success was: “If at first you don’t succeed, have a nice piece of cake and a diet soda”. (Yeah, a diet soda. My family wouldn’t dream of drinking a glass of whole milk but we could eat an entire Sarah Lee cake as long as we washed it down with Tab or some sort of low fat dairy product)

When I was a tyke on my momma’s knee and I tried to master a new motor skill, like attempting to insert my current food source into my own mouth, but dropped my bottle of juice nipple first into the fish bowl instead, a sweet treat was shoved into my wailing pie hole to stop me from feeling the agony of defeat. “Eat this and don’t worry about manual dexterity. Not everybody can be coordinated”. My family was very good at making underachieving a desirable state. An art form, even.

Didn’t make the Pee Wee Semi-Retards softball team? Have a cookie.

You weren’t picked to crown the Our Lady Of Fatima statue? Again? Let’s go get some ice cream.

You still can’t balance your fat ass on a two wheeler at the age of 9? A bag of chips and a grape soda will take away the humiliation of being the only kid in third grade still using training wheels.

And so it went. Bringing home C’s on the report card was totally acceptable. At least it showed a mustard seed level of effort being made in the classroom. If my faith was allowed to be that tiny, why not my IQ?

Mom and Dad both worked in sweaty clothing factories and came home covered in thread and humble pie. Payday was the weekly Holy day for us and usually meant daddy came home with fried flounder and French fries from the local diner for supper. (Italian Catholics, doncha know?) And candy for dessert. And ice cream. And cake. And, yes, diet soda.

The best part of the working year for them was the LAY OFF! Early in the spring, when all the seasonal work was finished, my parents were put on hold until sometime in the summer. Mom would joyfully hit the unemployment office and dad would get a job pumping gas.

So, how would I know how to excel? Or when to stop eating for that matter? My role models never stepped over the mundane, never made waves and certainly never felt the need to do something better. My favorite aunt never passed her driving test. Too much trouble to read the manual and actually REMEMBER the main points of driving. So, she walked herself uptown to the bakery and sugared herself into a state of blissful numbness. And that is how I learned to deal with life-don’t try too hard; you can always eat cake.

So that’s where my career went-to the cake factory. I have contented myself with eating copious amounts of baked flour and sugar instead of setting my sights on a loftier goal.
If I had been raised by doctors, lawyers, politicians or even wolves my life may have turned out better. No use fretting about it now. The past cannot be changed but at least there are more diet beverage choices to go with my cake now.