Tao of Gabe: On the Grammatics of Love Addiction

Tao of Gabe

Gabe the Emancipated Beaver here with a recently expired poetic license. So any metaphor I use will be as illegal as your hairstyle should be.

That was a simile. Don’t worry, I’m okay.

Hopefully I’ll manage to renew my license before somebody turns me in to the Grammar Police. There’s nothing more embarrassing than Grammar Police brutality. At least the Fashion Police have the decency to beat you in stylized, matching uniforms.

As long as I stay away from poetic subjects like love, death, unrequited love, and barely requited death, I’m okay.

Speaking of love, remember back in grade school when a single look from the girl/boy/goldfish you liked made your heart melt?

Whatever happened to those days? Where does the time go?

“To the past, usually.”

The problem with love is that it is such an addictive thing that we develop a tolerance (ref. “Addicted to Love” by Robert Palmer). At age 20, if a girl only kisses you on the cheek on the third date, then you’ve likely entered the realm of “friend” who pays for food. (That’s complete with quotation marks around the word friend.)

If, on the other hand, a girl kissed you on the cheek in second grade, your friends might search your backpack for your love potion or Funky Cold Medina.

As years and experience goes up, we get better at knowing who, when, how, and in some cases what to love. This is much in the same way that a cocaine or accent-addict might know his craft better than the casual beaver.

And like black-tar heroine, Mountain Dew: Code Red, and the finest Cuban accent, love increases in cost with each increase in quantity. The only problem is that with love, the increase isn’t in money: it’s in emotional energy and time spent.

Also money.

There doesn’t seem to be a way out of the cycle other than brain damage or changing sexual orientation every year, but I wouldn’t recommend that. After girls and boys, goldfish just don’t cut it.

By the way, sorry I went off on a tangent: today is the third and a half anniversary of the first time my second wife twice removed’s favorite cat Mittens died. If you’ve ever gone through that ordeal, you know what I’m talking about and where I’m coming from.

If you’ve never gone through that ordeal, you’re probably laughing and saying “Gabie, you’re coming from the page, silly.”

However, I stress that while the random drug reference might be funny to most people as a comparison, there is nothing remotely funny about accents. This is especially true of bad accents. For more information, visit your public library and use their high-speed internet to look it up on Wikipedia.

Uh, oh, I’m in trouble. Extended metaphors carry 25 to life.

Love, but it’ll cost you,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: Christian is a weird name. You never hear of anybody called ‘Jew’ or ‘Pagan.’”

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Land Down Under

Seth has asked me numerous times to post about Australia. Apparently, this land holds the same place in his heart that my 6th grade playground holds for me (seriously now: I’m not being facetious. We both realized something in the respective thens that changed the way we viewed the world).

I’ve avoided posting about it for that reason (and because I didn’t know what to post on), but it’s time I stop postponing the event and write about how fantastic– as in from a fantasy– life in Australia legitimately is. I’ve been hit with intense appreciation for the land and my time here recently that I just cannot convey in words. It’s time I write an eloquent blog and post several awe-inspiring landscape pictures so that you can understand a minute fraction of what I am living in.

It’s time. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to go through with it.

Ha ha, suckers!

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Accepting Vagueness

When I was a young lad, I always had a problem with knowing where I stood with regards to my friends. Sometimes they didn’t know I existed (literally), other times they were the ones that were imaginary.

I was always trying to find certainty. I would say, “I don’t care if you love me or hate me, so long as I feel the same and realize it.”

At least that was the general gist of it…

… except for the ‘don’t care’ and ‘hate’ parts.

Anyway, I would always try to force clarity in my relationships. Nothing was worse in my eyes than not knowing how to act when I saw somebody (after all, human interaction isn’t in my nature. I’m a textual beast).

Some time ago, I tried to make something clear that was best left in vagueness. It was responsible for an abrupt shift in a relationship of mine. It was in reconciling the aftermath of the event that I realized what the problem was.

I am a male. As a male, there’s a biological drive towards women (or so I understand, I’ve never felt it myself. More than anything it’s a slow idle or a push). In this society, a man and a woman cannot be ‘just friends‘ without there being some stigma or nudging from their acquaintances. (here’s a fun projekt: hold hands with a friend of yours of the opposite sex for one day. See if you can make it 24 hours without anybody commenting. After that, try groping each other for one day.)

I fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker. I thought “any guy would do what I did,” never realizing that that wasn’t the point. The point isn’t certainty, for if people can hardly be classified, what are the chances that relationships can be?

No, the Platonic Friendship scale and the Erotic Relationship scale are vague measures and should be treated as such. They’re idealized forms of the world. Attempting to force all your relationships into those labels will leave you with far fewer relationships. Trust me, I know.

It was when I realized the disjunction between my innate drive to label people and relationships and the actual state of affairs in the world that I decided to stop worrying and love the vagueness.

I accept vagueness now. I need not know who people are or who I think they are, I need not know what they feel towards me or what I feel towards them, I need not clarify trivial misunderstandings, and I need not ask for more information when it is not provided.

Life is vague

… well, sort of.

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