What's Love Got To Do With It

Everything and Nothing, As It Turns Out

Photo by Amos Bar-Zeev on Unsplash

I suppose any decent analysis of this writer’s life would be incomplete without at least a passing glance at the role played by Love, or what was felt to be Love at the time. Suffice it to say that Love itself can be rather fleeting, if not outright ethereal.

Sex on the other hand is all too often fleeting and not particularly ethereal. One blunt reality is that if your first encounter involves the back seat of a car, you probably had to learn the hard way the confusing mishmash of love and/or sex that somehow gets all tangled up in the hypothalamic zones of erogenous brain central. Many spend their entire lives trying to sort it all out. Not me, I know when I’m whipped.

So there you are, frittering away the hours in an offhand way, kicking around in your home town, waiting for something or someone to show you the way. Next thing you know, you’re married to #1, humming some Floyd. Then one day you find that you wake up next to blonde and pretty, but pretty soon, pretty morphs insidiously into pretty goofy.

On the bright side was a witty, hippie-dippy brother who had some killer chemical solutions to the problems of the day. Once things went pysychedelic, reality seemed vastly improved … if I recall correctly, which I probably don’t.

Of all the retrospectively nonsensical yet iconic things we did in the 70’s, going to “The Flicks” in downtown Dallas at midnight was tops. “Reefer Madness” would open our eyes to the evil of the government’s war on drugs, while Rocky’s Horror would Show us the value of wild satire slipped totally off the chain. Nothing quite like being smacked in the head with a roll of toilet paper in a movie theater full of water pistols firing away madly. Umbrellas up!

Brother-in-law was a mechanical Volkswagen genius with a yard full of Beetles, dead Beetles and V-dub Microbus carcasses to prove it. At age twenty-something he was tall and skinny as a rail, albeit a rail sporting bell bottoms, auburn hair with ponytail and beard, a living likeness of most Jesus pictures ever painted. Could have been the actual Jesus, he was that cool. I guess I should have asked him. Truth or dare, he couldn’t lie about it.

His modest wood-frame house, situated on a large lot in some semi-rural outskirts would seem an unlikely spot for tripping the light fantastic. Turns out it was the perfect place to stay up all night, laugh your guts out and make a monumental memory. (Just so you know, trippy mind warps are forever off the menu for this intrepid wannabe time traveler. But for that one episode of curiosity it was a sharply vivid excursion into the mind and beyond. Surreal, yet so real.) My big mistake was thinking I could eat a cheeseburger, the first dusty bite of which almost gagged your author to death.

So there I was, marinating in the metroplex, working in mind-numbing factory jobs and attending random night skool classes at Junior College. I had it all. But being the hopeless dreamer, I wanted more. So I ditched the whole DFW scene for the Piney Woods with a brand new plan … Forestry! Not even kidding a bit.

The dream got summarily crap-canned soon after realizing I didn’t want to spend my days counting trees, as noble and worthy an endeavor as that is. Plus, with a title like Ranger Johnny, who would ever take me serious.

Maybe I’ll become a doctor, yeah that’s it. Doctor Johnny sounds way better than Ranger Johnny. Or does it? Hard to know these days.

The wifey (you know … the whole reason for starting this rambling tangent) played a minor role in all of this until one day (during our daily bike ride no less) she blind-sided me with the bombshell that she still had feelings for a boy she knew in high school, and that she would like to go find out if those feelings were real.

What was I to say? “Nope! Sorry, sit down and pretend you love me, just like always!”

After going away to visit her erstwhile punk, she returned and fought valiantly to regain my love and affection. Taking back a wondering, wandering woobie is not in the playbook of a newly-minted bachelor, especially one freshly freed from the chains of a marriage that had precious little reason for its existence in the first place.

Strike one, you’re out!

~~ j ~~

“You know I love you, I’ll always be true, so please love, love me do.”

~~ The Beatles

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