Crush

“Romantic love is the ennoblement of basic lust in a society with too much time on its hands”

I had formed something close to that “revolutionary" statement in college regarding what may be the world’s largest wastes of time, resources and finances next to linear particle colliders. It is exactly the type of statement to be made by a bugeoning cynic with knowledge collected and sorted like precious coins to be forged by youthful idealism into a sharpened edge to sunder outdated notions and unproved myths.

Such a well-formed concept then meets head-on its first and eternal antithesis in the Copernican-like submission, the crush.

The crush as opposed to the object of the crush may be explained as some combination of pheromones, thoughts and feelings focused by civilized politeness. But to say that much is to admit that it is real. It has weight and occupies space. There are no small crushes. It is loud and insistent and pulls upon your attentions at all hours. It is both the fuel and ignition for stupid poetry and brainless ballads. And more than that, it is the filter that makes the stupid and the brainless truer than one’s own name.

Unfortunately, it is one sided, because a crush isn’t a crush after it’s been mutually expressed. When that happens it’s mush, and at best it has only a one-in-four chance of happening: 1) he does but she doesn’t - strike; 2) she does but he doesn’t - strike; 3) neither he nor she does - strike, duh; and 4) he does and she does - bingo! See, one in four. And of course the odds grow ever worse with “he lied”, “she just wants to have fun” and $1,000,000 in prize money. But it’s the one-sided aspect that makes the crush a private bittersweet thing, with high chances for it to crash and crumble.

On the up side, a good and thorough crush will boost creativity. But even at it’s worst, what harm is there to write the 24,601st song to rhyme “girl” and “world”, or to bake cookies with too much salt in them. Practically speaking, the world is a better place for crushes if it accomplishes no other thing than encourage people to more closely attend their hygiene and bathe more frequently.

On the extreme down side: Grecian/Trojan level destruction and super-villains.

Left Brain say, “you fool.”

Right Brain says, “yeah, so what?”

I know that everything that I’ve ever written and drawn is in part an attempt to impress some body else. That may be as much an awkward form of social integration as it may be symptomatic of a crush, but in either case, that’s a lousy statement with which to conclude this article, so let me try this:

Only the crush knows why birds suddenly appear,…

… you fool.