On Love - Part One

I really should stop mocking adults who enjoy Disney cartoons. If smoking and drinking are legal (and marijuana and heroin are almost legal), then who's to say that it's wrong to be hooked on cans of syrupy, song-filled side characters with foreign accents and overly handsome, baritone heroes? Romance is equal in its cost and potential for destruction when compared to any other drug. I'm just a little miffed that nobody bothered to give me the straight dope.

Cigarettes were once billed as being healthy. Any current film that takes up the banner in the war on tobacco will have a black and white clip from the 1950s showing a white-coated actor playing a doctor who will suck on a fag, flash a mouth full of teeth and describe how his low-tar cigarette is good for him. Wine makers try to convince us that sour grapes not only help to embarrass us at parties but can help us live longer to apologize for the damage. Marijuana kills brain cells, heroin will just plain kill you, but good ol' romance is responsible for a litany of destruction: divorce, depression, murder, suicide, STDs, war and of course, getting addicted to other drugs. If somebody had just simply told me that "falling in love" was a type of physio-psychological-chemical dependence, things would have been a lot easier.

Now it was true I didn't ask or even if I had or did, I probably wouldn't have gotten the answer that I wanted. My parents never gave any information even remotely close to what it was all about. I knew if your parents smoked, you'd probably smoke; but on this matter, I could never fathom the random musings of God that put my parents together. Luckily around the time I was graduating, my father did check up on me. He asked, "So you know about sex, right? They taught you in school?" I nodded. "Good." He then joined into a nodding which was tinged with an assuring hue.

The best part about love as a drug is its you still get a kick out of it even when it goes bad. You can remember the funniest time you got high, but you can't remember anything after being completely blotto. I can however, remember every time I've been turned down. There is always that moment, the twist, the increasing pitch of the faltering airplane propeller, the turn of the screw in the stomach, the forming of the 'o' on the lips. Hours, days and possibly weeks later, I am replaying the tragicomedy of it before my friends. I'll remember each break-up and at various times afterwards I'll forget the bad parts and remember the good, cheerfully and blissfully bringing the glass/bong/pipe/needle towards me again.

The next time I'm at the local DVD pusher, I'll probably run into a colleague, we'll probably drone on about work and then they will gush at having found "The Little Mermaid". I'll nod, smirk, keep my mouth shut, cast my eyes downward and also think wistfully about a fish story.