I sat in on a management ethics class today for the sheer novelty of it. After about an hour and a half my mind began to wander and I had a thought about the old days. Yes, the early nineties. I remembered what it was like growing up with the ever active horemones of a young man.
I was always the observer, and not by choice. Love was so personal then, it was my own. To a large extent it was all in my head and rarely actualized in the phyiscal world. I have to give Adam (from the story of Adam and Eve) some credit, he had some guts. His barrier between himself and the apple was God himself, and yet still he feasted from the tree of knowledge. Back then, the barrier between myself and the apple of my eye was my own insecurity and rather then climb the tree I simply settled for the grass. (If I smoked weed to compensate for sexual frustration, that would've been a wicked metaphor!)
But there was still something very beautiful about those youthful emotions. Even though they were rarely actualized, they were such vivid emotions that it never really mattered. The vague thoughts of what it would feel like just to feel her hair, just to have her close to me, just to have her eyes meet mine with warmth and perhaps even a smile, that feeling of anticipation ran deep inside me and kept me warm, like good rum.
"What it would be like..." was the question back then. High school came around and I got my answer - not with her of course, what funny chubby shy kid ever gets that privilege? No, "what it would be like" became a far less personal question in high school, far less subjectve. And as the horemones persisted and the desperation increased I lost track of what I really meant when I used to ask that question, and I just wanted to know what it would be like, to touch hair, to feel skin...the eyes were less important. Eventually, lucky me, I got my answer - law of averages, I suppose - and the quesiton faded away.
It's a common conception that when beauty is lost, it's lost for good, but the beauty of personal desire for me has been botoxed. In that brief instant in management ethics I had a vivid recollection of those feelings while looking at some girl across the way in a pink hoody. Funny thing is, it wasn't even really her that mattered, she simply sparked that thought. I don't know her at all. Romantically, she's about as significant as a match, that sparks the flame that lights the fire that keeps me warm; two rocks or a lighter would've done the same for me.
Who's my fire? Who is it that keeps me warm? Answering that question for sure, on my own, in my basement on a monday night is about as hard as building a fire, on my own, on an island on any night! I'd love to say that the previous comparison was weak, because after years of experience you would certainly know how to build a fire on your own, but after years of experience with trying to answer "who's my fire" on my own, I'm pretty much where I started, clueless. Fact is, my metaphor is actually rather strong. After years of failing to produce an answer to that question I've realised that there's very little merit in trying to answer it on my own; that approach is now dead. And if I ever took this long to build a fire on a deserted island on my own, well I'd be dead. Incorporated into my standard for desire now is reciprocity. I need to feel that what I feel is also felt for me. If I can't get that from you, that I can only tell you that you're not my flame because between the two of us, we're clearly out of matches!
I suppose I didn't really lie, I'm still saving talk about philosophy until after exams. Which is the 22nd instead apparently. It never really ends.
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