Poor Mojo's Almanac(k) Classics (2000-2011)
| HOME | FICTION | POETRY | SQUID | RANTS | archive | masthead |
Rant #376
(published April 3, 2008)
Boy + Girl
by Adam Moorad
In case you did not know, you have a soul mate and, if you are to ever feel fulfilled or happy in your life, you must find this human being. If you fail to discover this person who has been hand selected for you by the gods, and you may very well be unsuccessful in this endeavor, you are doomed to a life of empty Internet chat rooms, dead-end jobs, and unhappy Happy hours.

Though you will meet several eligible individuals who may or may not fit your specific and idealized criteria for who or what you're soul mate should be, you will resign yourself to the fact that it is a decision you must make and you will either become the lucky beneficiary of one's amorous jackpot or an unlucky participant in some sort of romantic Russian roulette.

Most may not entice you, but others will. You may see an adequate person for the first time, and they are only considered to be adequate in relation to everyone else who is less-adequate, and you might not get to actually meet him or her, but you are able to make and take a mental note and picture of this person who, for some reason or another, you consider to be worthy of a second mental note and picture and maybe a third and fourth.

It could be the first day of Spanish class and you might involuntarily stare at this individual for the whole hour and, for some reason, you think about majoring in Spanish — just like her — even though you hate it and suck at it because, like an idiot, you have allowed physical attraction to completely outweigh and undermine one of your huge life-decisions.

You could meet this person while working at her father's office or you could meet while babysitting his little brother and, all of a sudden, work becomes mistakenly fun to you.

You could meet at the health club while climbing adjacent Stairmasters at the YMCA or you could be introduced by friend of friends of friends, none of whom are your real friends but you pretend to be their good friend as it enhances your proximity to this person who you don't even know that well but still like.

This person could be the son or daughter of your father's partner in the law firm that pays for your cell phone bills, car insurance, gas, and college education and, from the moment you hit puberty, your parents have impressed upon you the fact that this boy or girl is smart, attractive, and Baptist enough for you and is the one you should marry because you two kids, as a team, look great on paper and your subsequent union will also sustain both families' wealth and legacy and will perpetuate the Southern-gentry class for at least another generation which, for some reason, is perceived as a good thing.

Maybe you'll find a person that displays a striking resemblance to someone you used to date, like your first or favorite love, and you cannot help but be attracted to him or her in a subconscious attempt to relive the only time you can recall being half-happy in your entire life. Let's face it: we never really get over the first so we are forced to settle for the latest or the last.

Perhaps you'll meet a person who has a dull, black-and-white-headed face just like yours and their cosmetic shortcomings give you a sense of equivalency and security that is so rare in Hollywood's America.

It pains one to say, but you could also meet this person online and nurture a digitized style of romance where you know nothing of this person's personal history, but you are still incredibly infatuated with this person because conventional dating has always highlighted and agitated your inborn social anxiety disorder and low self-esteem.

You could meet this person in a forced and awkward situation initiated by your parents and her parents who have all struck a jovial friendship that is upheld once a week at your local synagogue and, in a effort to maintain the ancient Hebraic tradition that has sustained your people for centuries, the pairs of parents have, logically, decided that this Jew belongs with that Jew.

You might be attracted to this person because he reminds you of everything that your father is not: spontaneous, attractive, smart, and accepting or you might absolutely adore this girl because she reminds you so much of your mother in what is society's only acceptable Oedipal relation.

At last, when you're in his or her presence, you sit and gawk or stand agog in your vegetative state and when you finally come face to face with the object of your heart's desire, you know what you shouldn't say and that's what you do say because you're too preoccupied with gawking like an imbecile. In all honesty, it's a miracle you are able to say anything at all because you cannot help but sit and think of fuck-all anyways.

When you do subsequently strike a mutual friendship or attraction, the inevitable competition begins that is best described smoke-and-mirror struggle to not let the other know or think that you might like them more than they actually like you because (a) no one likes a hopeless, clingy romantic and (b) the acquired knowledge of your stronger more personal feelings gives your opposite the authoritative upper-hand in the relationship, thus drawing attention to your pitiful vulnerability and your obvious inability to be considered a qualified lover.

If you are able to successfully avoid scaring him or her away, and he or she you, your previous epic struggle for relational domination seems a contrary relic of the past and the two of you are finally able to enjoy the company of one another honestly and persistently, which is another miracle in itself.

You think you're in love and even if you're not, you really really want to be so that you'll finally be able to understand everyone's infatuation with the movie Titanic and all those song on the radio will, for the first time, make sense to you. You begin to thirst for this thing called love because generations of high-school TV dramas have trained you to think that way. Even though you don't know what the fuck it means, you say "I love you" (or "I l-u-v you", as it reads a little less scary) and you hope to hell he or she says the same thing back, and they do.

So then, congratulations, you are in love now.

Love can be the strong fondness for another that arises out of the emotive foundation of kinship or other, more intimate, ties.

Love can be the unrestrained and unconcealed affection and tenderness that is shared by lovers and not those who are entangled in perpetual self-affliction and a near-poignant social coarseness that makes them unable to love and be loved.

Love can be the warm admiration of and attachment to an object of endearment or impediment.

Love can be God's fatherly concern for humanity and can be a sexual embrace that is also known as copulation. It can also be a cat, dog, car, or drug.

Love can also be the score of zero, as it is in tennis — a concept that is not entirely understandable to most.

Love can be something that penetrates the unified infinity of everything and it can be poems that can help you transform your mind into thinking differently about fuck knows what and fuck knows why.

Love: you can have it, you can lose it, you can take it, you can make it, you can learn it, and you can also hate it, kill it, or just leave it in the dusty doldrums of wayward youthful exuberance and self-centered ideology regardless of how old or how centered you really are.

Love is many things and wears many faces and the one constant that arises from it is the fact that no one loves to lose it.

It would seem evident to the individual that the literal act of getting, finding, having, losing, hurting, searching, and rediscovering love is a continuous, self-perpetuating cycle that is only rendered defunct by the successful navigation of such a cycle that culminates in sustaining a parallel and no less unremitting cycle of being able to successfully remain in love.

The break-up, the event or the act of, is the prospective fulcrum of these two converging cycles that perpetuates all of the aforementioned searching, losing, getting, and having of love that is defined by the hoards of nickel and dime romances that have waged constant war on your person.

We move from girl to girl or guy to guy with a newfound hope that this next relationship will provide what you think a relationship should; like a regime change in the Balkans where, ironically, no matter what, someone is going to get killed.

This pivotal moment or period that the break-up tends to be, stems from a variety of internal and external elements working against a pair of persons who were once in love.

It could be that your boyfriend has recently decided to ball one of your former best friends in an act that has led you to ultimately question his ability to really treat you the way you want to be treated, regardless of how you actually deserve to be.

It could be that your girlfriend has, as of late, developed a slight drinking problem that has driven her to make some irresponsible decisions in your estimation, through which she has grown into what some might call a make-out slut. Even though this has not directly impacted your immediate feelings about her, her wayward actions have damaged your reputation as you have become, whether you like it or not, the guy who is essentially incapable of appeasing his girlfriend and has indirectly forced her to graze in other men's pastures — without your expressed written consent — so you look like an idiot.

It could also be that your boyfriend, who has always been an over-achiever at heart, has recently accepted an offer from one of the northeast's esteemed academic institutions to study rocket science, botanic genotypes, cellular membranes of ionic isotopes, or the invariability of macro-economic expansion in the third world, and has left you to study the P.E. at your local state university and you swear he has made this decision just to piss you off and you admire and hate him for it.

Maybe he or she has, time and time again, brought a single small-scale infidelity that occurred two years prior and while you claim that "you were so much younger then", she still can't get over it and you can't get over the fact that she can't get over it.

Perhaps it could be that the things you have loved about your girlfriend are the very things you have come to hate. Her laid-back attitude has become an unending laziness, her outgoing mind-set has become a bimboic annoyance, and where the number of friends she has use to speak of her inherent likability, you now view such to be her compensation for the emotional and social insecurity that defines her.

It could be that the pity you feel for this person entirely overwhelms the affection you once had for them: his family was absolute shit and you are unable to see, regardless of how old you are, the two of you starting your own family successfully.

Or perhaps your boyfriend or girlfriend says to you one day "I want to go backpacking in Western Europe" and this strikes you as complete crap because you know they have never spent more than fifteen minutes outside in their whole life.

It could be that you two have simply just outgrown one another as your new and developing interests conflict with those of your partner. You can get a new job out of town selling insurance to small companies while your boyfriend or girlfriend remains in the comfortable and provincial confines of his or her hometown waiting on tables or selling real estate, and you can't understand how this could actually leave a person fulfilled. As a result, you develop a false sense of superiority because you have suddenly begun to consider yourself to be a well-rounded industrialist while digressing into a Donald Trump-style complex of misdirected energy that borders micro-megalomania. You have fallen out of love because, for some reason, you have simply decided to use the person you did love as a yardstick to measure yourself.

It could be that you're just sick and tired of waiting for this person you supposedly loved to become the person you always thought, wanted, and believed he or she would eventually become and you can no longer stand it anymore because it feels like dating this person is like standing in line at the DMV or like being eternally stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.

Or maybe he or she just can't take anymore of what one may perceive as "your shit" and, in an effort to alleviate this tension, you must be removed from the picture because, for him or her, you are productivity's enemy and Satan's crutch; too bad for you.

You will fight and cry and have tantrums and meltdowns. You will shout and you will kind of make that whisper-whimper noise that a dog makes when it really needs someone to let it outside so it can take a piss. You won't talk for a few days and then decide to talk and then you will decide to have sex one last time and then you will decide to give one another one last chance which results in more drawn-out drama and disparity between the two of you because going without fucking for one day was just too much for you to handle.

It is funny really. Notice the phrase "fall in love", it's not "ascend into love" or "elevate into love" — in its own language, love is a digression.

When all else has failed, both of you have decided to have a sit down, like an end-all-be-all gunslingers duel that will define what should be done to cure the ailing environment that both of you have been living in. You think about what you want to say and do ahead of time, like you're trying to prepare yourself for the game of your life or the LSAT, but you feel like you're walking into a gas chamber.

The unbridled and ill-advised emotion of the eventual encounter and interaction is, unfortunately, strictly limited to the linguistic capacity of each involved and will be initiated by basic question patterns that will be met by reciprocating and partial answers that entail various reflexive verbs, infinitives, imperative articles, and idioms that describe the present state of being of each person and the forthcoming actions to be taken if a + b does in fact equate to c.

Accordingly, the psychological illustration that each person attempts to paint will be unavoidably masked by the tender feelings that have emerged, or de-emerged, over the preceding year, month, or week and the past, present, and future manifestations of the relationship, in itself, evokes such emotional discombobulation that resolution, progress, and closure elude the pair as a result of the romantic sentimentality trumping pragmatic thought and communication in a consequence that butt-fucks both.

Interrogative adverbs and pronouns expressing the object, disjunctive, possessive, and demonstrative status of each will be confused by the inevitable misconstruction and misinterpretation of the present and past subjunctive and subjunctives that come after certain conjunctions, indefinite antecedents, and superlative statements. These foregoing vocabulary structures will be interrupted by all of the getting-up and leaving and coming-back and will be further muddled by the incorrect usage of prepositions with infinitives, the present participle, and the erroneous formation of the future perfect, the past conditional, and other various tense sequences. If you haven't figured it out already, words will just get in the way.

You will try to be friends and you will try to be kind and supportive to one another when all you are really doing is trying to keep the other within striking distance to win him or her back because you have always thought you would end-up together and still do and you are unable to think otherwise.

You stand in relational-limbo where you days are spent waiting for a phone call or an e-mail or a chance encounter that will restore order to the universe and make everything what it once was.

Everything tastes like chalk, everything feels like splinters, and everyone you see looks like a threat or looks like your boyfriend or girlfriend who you realize is now your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend and this makes you want to run and jump into moving traffic as you upchuck breakfast, lunch, and dinner all over yourself.

Even though you don't mean it and won't admit it, you think, "I'm going to kill myself" and you might think of the different ways you could do such in a fashion melodramatic enough to send a message to your lost love that somehow conveys to them that you were right and they were wrong. You shouldn't feel embarrassed about your low-grade suicidal tendency because Saved by the Bell and Dawson's Creek have ingrained this fatalistic conception of love into you since you began to think.

Boy + Girl, the equation, the chasing of systematic order on the level of quantum mechanics where everything happens at random and all meaning is unavoidably arbitrary as he and she both are unable to move past the basic level of the understanding of self: I am warm, I am cold, I am happy, I am sad.

The stimulation and simulation of romantic sentimentality evokes a plotted outline in all things, the romance included, in a world where all plots are liner and point towards death.

Boy + Girl, in a continuous condition of travel and discovery undergoing countless sets of mutations, and mutations of mutations, that occur at random with so many factors that going into such.

Boy + Girl, the damsel in distress and her knight in shining armor, neither of which who can change their predispositions. Either is or either is not.

Sorry Cinderella, you fairy godmother had a date tonight and couldn't turn that pumpkin into a golden chariot so this movie script is over and Fabio, it turns out that you are not as desirable as you and the rest of us once thought you were, so cut your fucking hair. Your way of looking at the word love falls, feel falls, into complete conflict with anything already proven to be fact by Newtonian physics, Social Darwinism, the Phenomenological, and every idea of modernity.

Boy + Girl. Plot. Beginning, Middle, and End.

Share on Facebook
Tweet about this Piece

see other pieces by this author

Poor Mojo's Tip Jar:

The Next Rant piece (from Issue #377):

TITLE: DRUNK FUCK
by Cruz A. Fernandez

The Last few Rant pieces (from Issues #375 thru #371):

The Nastiness Online: A Rant in Conversation
by David Erik Nelson and Morgan Johnson

An Introduction to Pedro Carolino's The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English
by Mark Twain

Alchemy
by William Stonebraker

Hey, Baby
by David Erik Nelson

A Righteous Proposal
by Larry Gaffney


Rant Archives

Contact Us

Copyright (c) 2000, 2004, David Erik Nelson, Fritz Swanson, Morgan Johnson

More Copyright Info