Love is not Love which alters when it alteration finds....

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This was originally a comment on Daniela's blog, but, alas, brevity has never been my forte.

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I think the biggest mistake I've made in previous bouts with amour is this: it was always, (solely) about the other person and what I thought society orchestrated as acceptable. Not initially at first. At first it was about (still is about) my heart doing a little irish jig inside my chest and often times (honestly) being more allured to the feeling of Love...that drooling, dizzying, perplexing, wonderful state where everything around you....all of your romantic pinings, intellectual longings and flirtatious fetishes sprout up in front of you with boobs and bangs and sunset smiles. Moments like these propel the world of art. Laura inspired the pen of Petrach to devise his heart in the shape of the sonnet. Beatrice escourted Dante into the realm of the eternal light. Shams of Tabriz enflamed Rumi to swirl out his dervish longings in mystical adages. The Fair young Lad and the syphillis-ridden prostitute compelled the quill of William Shakespeare, whose sonnets were actually never intended to be published (kind of like our blogs--perhaps that's what they are eternal...the sonnets)....Here's my favorite Shakespeare Sonnet of all time. Sonnet 116:

Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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I used to, of course, have good bullshit definitions of the word love I'd employ in the late ninetites to (as they say in the locker room) cirlce the infield. I used to quote First Corinthians 13 (The love chapter of the bible...you know, love is patient, love is kind, love is lugubrious, love is a financial burden, love is watching her pms outta control for three days a month and nodding your head in feigned measured incrememnts as she tells you over and over again that "You just don't understand me,")...I had this schtick where I said that if you take out the word Love from that biblical chapter and insert the word of your purported beloved there instead, you would have crafted via MAD LIBS a valid definition of the word Love.

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I dunno. I went through a five year period where I dated a lot of older women. To my chagrin (hindsight being twenty-twenty) there was approximately a quarter of a century between Swissy-Who and Crazy Laurie. The only way I can tell about what I learned is to insert it honsetly into a recital like entry....And my advice to Lovers (I'm graciously flanked by two of them) is this. Find yourself first...Find that joy that you as a person solely possess...find what you are capable of giving and then give all of it. When this happens, mysterious creatures (some are lovers, but also little elves) creep out from the most unsuspecting places to assist you. To tell you that they believe in you. To tell you that they are in your corner, with their thumbs up, smiling.

My biggest sin was that, for years, I always equated my own self-worth and emotional status to the blonde on my left shoulder. We live in an accelerated image-driven society that hasn't made it easy for the true and disciplined lover. I don't know about you, but when the time rolled around and I was a crackly-voiced facial blemished fourteen year old with thick glasses and FINALLY (GHAST) had my first kiss (ahhhhhh......Jessica...wait, her name ends in an....!!!!!!), I had probably seen close to fifty thousand kisses climaxed on television and we didn't even get cable til I was ten.

So that's my ramble. I don't know much. I know that I love and that I live for apical moments of human connection. I know that I like to kiss. I know that it's just not plain healthy to follow your every innate, lusty animal instinct, even though you often find yourself on a dance floor where it seems to be encouraged (Funny how the Valley of Unbriddled Lust somehow got omitted from the final draft). I know that I live for moments of timelessness even though I live in the terse fleeting evaporating second of the moment itself. I know that I probably wouldn't have been a writer had I not had my heart smashed and crazy-glued back together and smashed again. I know that I'll never be a writer if I behave like a rockstar (even though I can dress like one). I know that I believe in the syncopated thuds of the human heart, the fathomless potential of mankind. I know that I'm sometimes a little envious at cool couples who have made it work and are still in love. I know that some nights I'm lonely but have no doubt that the pillow I'm groping will bear flesh and wings someday. I know that I'm grateful for everything. Dollops of blessings with a slice of forever pie.