love: A lifetime of irrelevance

      photo by Rodney Smith

In the short lifetime I have lived thus far, I have learned to cope with the idea of love. I have yet to understand it and I believe the majority of us never will. There have only been a handful of men in my life worth mentioning, and only a few of them earned my love. None of them have yet been able to keep it.

I'd like to be the first to blame age as a main factor in this ordeal. I'm a firm believer that youth is meant for mistakes and freedom. A wild horse does not want to be tamed any more than a teenager. Though my teenage years have come and gone, most of my beliefs on the subject have kept their roots firmly planted.

A second factor in love is knowing who works best for you. It's obviously not the easiest task to undertake and in all fairness, your taste will probably change every seven years or so. In my case, there has only been one characteristic that each love has shared with the other. That is, of course, music. Musicians. Managers. Roadies. Every member of this world at one point had a chance with me. Because at one point, this was my world. Unfortunately, this world is unrealistic and so, I moved on.

A third, and in my case, most important factor in love is location, location, location. So far, I've failed miserably in this area. The last two that I've fallen for had the undesirable quality of living in different states than me. Coincidentally, this was the only common ground that the two seemed to share (it goes back to that whole knowing who works best for you theory). While one had no desire to go to school and liked drinking himself into a drunken coma every weekend, the other was knee deep in grad school and never had had a drink in his life. They were night and day and I loved them both.

          This is an excerpt from a story that I'm working on.

It also happens to be the story of my life.

Anyway. I don't want to think about love.

I just want to think about summertime.

And driving to the middle of nowhere just to escape reality.