Got soul?
I’m so in love with this new ad that promotes
This could have been my ad. I was talking to my friend Chut the other day and I asked him, “Why doesn’t anything affect me anymore?” He told me it was a good thing; I’m growing up, evolving. I said, “Into what? A meteor?”
It’s true. My friends call me “Bagwan.” You know, that ever-reliable heater that has once or twice electrocuted us on mornings we needed more of a jolt than a shower? The machine that turns showers into a circus of different temperatures? Like Bagwan, I can be so hot and bewildered one day and then cool as an ice cube the next. Only one little misplaced thing is enough to bring me back to earth, where I belong — alone.
Once I was going out with this Brit and he e-mailed me, asking for some juicy gossip: “Prey tell” (sic). Didn’t these people invent English? This was just one of my many Jerry Seinfeld moments. The paint peels from many love interests and crushes at an alarming rate, often over something really stupid like texting me messages in pure consonants or sometimes just ordering a girly cocktail on a first date. I mean, these are just grazing partners, so it’s not heartless to immediately cool off an interest because of some benign and gut-churning behavior. I mean, how can we go further when the Romeo in question asks me, “WNT DRNK TNYT?” then proceeds to order a cosmo? The more errant one is me for going out for a drink with the consonant glutton.
This is Freon for the libido.
I’m sure I’ve had lots of paint-peeling moments myself. My tendency to be a hybrid of Tara Reid and Zelda Fitzgerald is up there. My inability to talk when I’m conversing with a guy I really like leaves the impression that I’m “special” — not special. That’s why my ex-fiancé (and my best friend) used to tell me to “fake mack” so I can practice greasing the whistle for the real thing. So I flirt with guys who interest me the way really bad Gus Van Sant movies do and practice my “moves.” Problem is, I have no moves. My face is so transparent, you’ll know immediately that all I’m thinking about at the bar is what I’ll be having for breakfast the next day.
For more complicated matters that do happen once in a while to the soulless, there are also some asteroids of emotions that are sometimes akin to the anticipation one feels fraternizing with talking cockroaches. It was once believed that the very thing that attracts us to a person is the active repellant in the end. For example, a fiercely opinionated girl will drive you wild with her staunchly modern ways. The paint peels when her opinion bleeds into your Fantasy Football time and your views on Mick Romney’s wife. The once-fierce and scintillating woman you lusted after has become the controlling egomaniac who has you so emasculated that you actually place bets on who’s going to win on Project Runway.
Lust can be the fecal matter or fairy dust of romance, depending on how it turns out. Jay McInerney’s book The Story of My Life follows the life of Allison Poole, a deposed rich girl who tries to get her soul back, after a wasted lifetime of boozing, hoovering, and, as she puts it, “falling in and out of lust.” In my book, lust is simply infatuation, although many accelerate the rather innocuous but salt-rimmed word to more carnal affairs. As my best friend and I always say, “Enjoy it while it’s lust.”
Lust, though, is a soul-eating praying mantis. Some people start thinking it’s love. It’s all downhill from there.
Lust makes everything seem right. Aberrations in love interests make you seem evolved. When the paint peels you realize you were just drunk. Quirks can be charming, even endearing. When the paint peels, they seem more clinical. Spats and arguments are almost intoxicating. But when the paint peels, you look for the restraining order.
That’s why maybe it’s a natural reaction for the disenchanted romantic pro to go sans soul. Go commando with your emotions. Like how the body rejects antibiotics when you’ve had one too many flu viruses. It’s just easier to shove away the emotions until later. Later being never, in some cases.
Then there comes a time in the soulless Hamlet’s life when someone so wrong becomes right and, even after the paint peels, lust is still there. Love is an act of the mind; lust is a feral and autonomous emotion. Although it hums most of the time, its staccato sound is rare and always unforgettable. These are moments to live by for the emotionally malnourished. Grand gestures are often called for to celebrate the resurrection of the cad.
Then the curse of the jaded scorpion shows itself. Growing up knowing my fairy tales Brothers Grimm-style, it’s hard to be dewy-eyed about romantic affairs. Dear John letters are drafted like letters of termination without severance. Failed romantic overtures are coated with laughter. I mean, didn’t these things matter once? Why, then, the sudden toppling of the dictatorship of the passionate heart and the sound mind? Then replaced by the autocratic regime of emotional catatonia?
Face it, I’m living in the “ho-kay” generation. Reggae music plays as background music to scandals and heartbreak. Although, once in a while, the paint peels from my jade-colored walls, and I see that, maybe one day, one guy who’s all wrong for me will seem right. Then I will have the comfort of knowing I was wrong all along.
