Complex Numbers

To Love Until I Laugh

"Blog Week Birthday Bastion 2024"   [13+] by WakeUpAndLive~doingNaNo'24

Prompt 3. Sept 3.

You can achieve all the things you want to do, but it's much better to do it with loved ones around you; family and friends, people that you care about that can help you on the way and can celebrate you, and you can enjoy the journey. ~John Lasseter

Your most significant other(s) is/are....! Write about your loved ones (furry or not).

Right, as if I were capable of love.

Okay, okay, that's a joke, and I'm determined not to make today's entry as existentially terrifying as yesterday's. But as I showed then, you can't count on anyone. Just saying. And not just because I was given up for adoption as an infant, either.

Still, "love" carries a lot of baggage and assumptions. The Greeks might have gotten it closer to right by slicing it up into sub-loves: eros, agape, whatever. They say the Inuit have dozens of words for snow. While this is probably false, like all legends, it illuminates what might be a greater truth: the more important a concept is culturally, the more words they'll have to describe its various shades and gradations. We just have two words for love: love itself, and like.

We've got dozens of words for killing, though. And hundreds of words for penis.

All of which is to say that while there are people (and cats) that I particularly care about, I neither have nor want a "significant other." I've been married twice, and you know what Einstein supposedly said about the definition of insanity.

Einstein probably didn't say that, though, and it's not really the definition of insanity.

You know who (probably) did originate that quote, though? According to some of my fact-checking sources, in its current form ("Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"), it was Rita Mae Brown, in the voice of one of her characters.

Rita lives near me. I met her a few times. Exceptionally nice lady. Cat person. I suspect she found it extraordinarily amusing that her quote became misattributed to the guy whose picture is in the dictionary under "genius."

Well, enough with the name-dropping. If it helps, I live near John Grisham, too, and never met him.

The point is, these days, I'm done with that sort of love. You know how some guys, they'll meet someone of their preferred gender, and their mind immediately fast-forwards ahead to the sex part? Mine fast-forwards to the breakup part, and I don't want to deal with that again.

But I have friends. And cats. That's enough for me.

Because if there's one thing I learned early and took with me into adulthood, it was how to be comfortable being alone. It always surprises me how much other people depend on each other, as if that rug won't be pulled out from under them at some point. Some say the pain of eventual abandonment is worth the pleasure of another's company, but I'm not so sure.

Don't dare think I'm bitter about it, though. I get that some people would be, but I'm not them. Mostly, as always, I'm amused, and laughter is one constant friend I can count on.

Let's do this again. We get to give out a free Merit Badge every day this week. Want one? Anyone who comments here before 11:30 pm WDC time today could get today's. (I'll need that extra half-hour to pick a winner and send the badge before midnight.)

To clarify:

When I say "comment," I mean comment. Not review. Though reviews are always welcome.
I also mean "here," not on the newsfeed post.
MB recipient will be chosen at random.
Maximum of one MB per commenter for the week.
If I don't get comments, I'll pick a previous commenter, and maybe not at random.
The MB will be the one I commissioned two years ago, "Complexity," which is a publicly available MB.
I appreciate all comments; this is just a little incentive.