What's #luv gotto do with it??

'The love song’ by 311 plays in the background. I see musicians one with the notes, the beats, the movements, synchronicity that softly brainwashes and sweeps you off your feet. Those boisterous tattoos over their arms and navels coming alive to conjoin, slowly swaying and jumping across onto others to infect, to touch, fleetingly. We are changed forever, for that one moment, the intoxication which cuts and unites the being…

“let the blue tent topple, stairs rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
In our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart”….

I can’t agree more with Plath on “Love is a parallax”, a madness that defies reasoning and logic. But ‘simple’?? I will have to drink more whiskey or kombucha to decipher simplicity in this context.

To write a post on ‘Mod Love’ is almost akin to divvying it up in a timeline construct. Perhaps the most logical way to do this is to measure abstraction against abstraction. My textbooks on ‘classical love’ are old and weary, ripping apart as I moisten my index finger with my tongue to flip through their ghost-like Erich Segal pages for wisdom. On the other hand, my new testament of love is rad touch screen and gratifies instantly, as I play fruit ninja with hearts. A rapid fast flowing gush of feelings that surges and plunges exuberant like waterfalls, unrestricted, unbridled by geographical latitudes and longitudes.
But the ‘science’ of love defines it much more dispassionately (I wonder if that is the 'simplistic' chemical breakdown which Plath alludes to)…adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin…sum up the four stages of euphoric orgasm. So I won’t bother with the feeling itself (that where did I lose my glasses, syndrome) but rather explore some intangible parameters of its ‘post-modern’ transgressions.

In a world where our interactions are a function of who we meet and date, or date and meet, within a myriad of social media choices, the dynamics of falling in love can be found on a buffet like platter served to you as breakfast in bed without having to spend much mullah. In pjs, with a ciggy or a joint dangling off the corners of our non-Marlboro mouths, unkempt hair and perhaps naked, we interact and meet potential lovers every day (hyperbole). The arms-length reach of the internet is far and beyond sight or sound and powerfully addictive. For once, repression has found an outlet with the screen savvy romantic, not guarded by religion or politics or marital status or gender biases, the world is one large melting cauldron of wants and desires that flowers into love or dies a quick death like desert ephemerals based on a click of the Block button. It’s all hunky dory until we find that virtuosity is also a cruel, wicked game of illusion and entrapment that makes loneliness more real and painful. It’s like being conscious within a nightmare without anesthesia and waking up to a reality of bruises that blacken with each passing minute. Perhaps I should call this love cancer "skinny laptops and fat fingers" ..oh sir, do you suffer from the skinny lappy fat fingers cancer?? Me too!! 

There may be many fishes in this endless expansive virtual seascape, but social dysfunction can drown one, nonetheless. Exactly what or who are we fighting? But the ghosts of our selves. When Tom Cruise grandiosely professed that ‘Every day I fall in love more with Katie Holmes’, she ran. Rightfully so.

I ran too, only this time without my laptop and phone. Catch me if you can...(love)..