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"The Heart-Ache And The Thousand Natural Shakras/That Flesh Is Heir To…"

If you’re on the brink of the traditional Valentine’s Day pit of existential despair this year, there’s a special place that you can go. You can’t mend a broken heart, you can’t put your arms around a memory, you can’t take your love to town, you can’t violate that restraining order, and you can’t get served any more of those fancy whiskey drinks once you’ve started crying in them. However, you can be enlightened and uplifted by the stylings of… well, of he who needs no further introduction from me.

Why must it work this way? Why must a hierarchy of love exist? Why must we divide the concept? Don’t we know divided love can’t work?

Enlightened and uplifted yet? I thought so. This is a pearl from start to finish, folks, right from the moment he adds “a state of total confusion” to his outlook in the first paragraph. And there are more tantalizing glimpses of the inner man to come:

Unfortunately, I am not equipped with the knowledge to make a successful critique of monogamy, so I won’t even try.

If you read between the lines here, I think he’s trying to tell us that he’s got game like Parker Brothers.

It’s only the obligation-based aspects of monogamy that bother me.

See? He’s a stone-cold player. Mind you, you can replace the word “monogamy” in that sentence with virtually anything. Especially “journalism”. Virtually every line here demands its own rejoinder, but I’ll stop at one more:

What confuses me is how someone can claim to “love” another person and yet still condone, or do violence, [sic] to another. How can we hold our girlfriend’s and boyfriend’s hands in joy, but then berate a stranger based on the lone fact that he or she is unknown as we pass each other on the streets?

Because we’re in a bad mood? Because we mistrust strangers? Maybe because they write breathtakingly shitty columns in the local student newspaper? Because strangers stole our wallets and ran over our dogs? Who the hell knows? The pledge to unconditionally love all beings – “living and non-living”, even – doesn’t just devalue the notion of love, it renders it utterly meaningless. That may be the idea, of course: this is the kind of writing that just sucks the marrow out of any concept it brushes up against.

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