Baboon, I Get a Kick Out Of You

I am on the patch right now- you know, the one that releases tiny dosages of approval until you no longer crave what it is you truly don't need. The Portuguese call it Saudade: a deep emotional state of nostalgia, one where something so indefinite has to be inconceivable. You have the love affairs and the miseries of life; the way things were and the way things ought to be; the what-ifs and the what-nots; the depleted bodies and the empty bottles drowning in sea, filled with unwritten love letters and released with dopamine. I am an emotional plagiarist. I want to drape my body in the middle of Times Square. I want to lie there in deafening silence as the deranged rush to their destinations and I want to lie there sober with nowhere else to go and no one else to be. I want to lose control. I want to be stubborn and domineering and so fucking persistent. I want to rip that patch off and I want to deprive it of my skin.

Because you might as well face it, we are literally addicted to love. The brain's love-bitten counterparts resemble those that generate the euphoria induced by drugs. Love is Rock 'n' Roll; love is Jeff Buckley clinging to his last good-bye, twirling on a stool of consolation; love is in Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan; love is the narcissism of Kurt Cobain and his ability to simply love people too much, (too much that it made him feel too sad to live).

Love is sitting back and taking in this sensation that feels so good you wonder what you may have done to deserve this. Just like the prairie voles, just like the admirable snorting cocaine and blaming their cravings on the most innocuous occurrences- you know, like the smell or the pattern on a tie, or the diminutive mother spilling baby powder on her infant or the close propinquity of an eight-ball of prime Colombian just to feel shitty because Love is Rock 'n' Roll; love is the last dance; love is the one-way street but the only street in the whole goddamn town; love is getting dumped to only make you love the person even harder.

What 'tis to love? Shakespeare asked. Helen Fisher knows. Love is powerful. It brings its rapture to an unassuming wallflower, with a hunger so insatiable we can fulfill our anxiety by blaming it on the hypothalamus. We can blame it on the walking dead. It projects romantic fantasies on strangers more readily than we fall in love with people we already know. It chooses when we are ready to sell our beauty to men, our wealth and power to women.

Love drove our ancestral women and men to come together long enough to conceive, and long enough to produce offspring through attachment. Love drives us with exhilaration and into three systems simultaneously working toward dangerous results. We can feel deep-attachment to a life-partner and we can feel romantic love for someone else, to only feel a sexual drive for neither. This independence gives us jealously, adultery and divorce; it gives us polygamy and promiscuity and maybe a few extra children here and there, leading to a bigger stake in the genetic future. Love is a stronger craving than sex because people who don't get sex don't kill themselves. Love does not build us to be happy but to reproduce. At least that's what Helen Fisher told us. At least someone knows something around here.

And if shit couldn't get any more complicated, we turn to a bunch of equity theorists as they examine intimate relationships and introduce some sort of profit and exchange point of view. In Liking and Loving, Rubin states (ever so eloquently) the notion that people are "commodities" and social relationships are "transactions." It makes sense. Just think about the depth and breadth of information exchange. Think about the social penetration and how in casual relationships we usually only exchange the sketchiest of information, while intimates are roasting around campfires sharing personal histories, values, idiosyncrasies, hopes, and fears, oh my. They're feeding each other gourmet marshmallows while the rest of us are diverging in the he said she said bullshit. As if gift-exchanges weren't enough, we're now obsessing over the dynamism of reciprocity in order to feel adequate. One word: dog-eat-dog capitalism. (Ok, that was four, BUT AREN'T ALL MEN CREATED EQUAL????)

Nothing in this world is single. The mountains mingle with the river and the river with the oceans. The lungs mingle with life and life mingles with death. The pennies mingle with dollars and dollars mingle with sense. It's complicated and it's exhausting, but if we all just cancel our vows and shake hands forever, at any time we meet again our former love will always retain. At least we can blame it on fantasy. At least I can blame it all on the oxytocin because these are my thoughts and because it's better to burn out than to fade away. At least that's what Cobain's suicide note told us.