Marco! (Polo!)

That is one ugly f'in unicorn

A critique in 6 movements.

An open response to a craigslist reply. Original in bold.

 “Have you ever been stopped dead in your tracks?”

This is just your identity seeing a co-star that would further improve your identity. Your brain is like a talent agent looking for a supporting cast for you, the star. Appears you found one.

“I can't sleep, I can't focus on work, I can't ride down the street without you in my head. Baby you have me so twisted inside I feel like I'm just going in circles.”

Your twisted all right, like a psychopath pretzel. It’s not the other person of course that twists you but your DESIRE to possess the other person. You want to to have them in your sitcom, or Rom-com. I suspect its more a horror flick but horrors the ending for sure. But I hate when I jump ahead like that.

“This must end soon, I must to have you in my life!!!!” 

Yes, because other people serve no other purpose than to be in or out of your life. It’s not like they have jobs or commitments, beliefs, dreams that in no way, shape or form include you. Nope. What matters, what only matters is that you have a need. We haven’t heard anything about WHY this person has you feeling this way. What it is about them that is unique and endearing. 

A gi-normous penis maybe? Shares the SSI check generously? Can wear his pants down low like nobodies business? He’s good with kids not his own? 

All we get is your feelings because, well, thats all there is to this story.

“I always turn the radio when those mushy love songs come on, but since I've met you I find myself listening to them, singing them in my head when I think of you” 

And when this dreamy guy is no longer needed in your movie, he will join the countless others whose memory simply has you turn the station. We are not singing THAT tune/guy anymore, are we? What is easily entered into is also easily cast aside. Turned like a knob on a old car’s radio to something new. And who listens to radio anymore?

“(which is every second of every day)! When I'm with you, everything goes away.” 

The compulsion, the drive is what makes people think they must be in love. But let us contemplate for a moment that we always feel like this when we meet someone new who we are sexually aroused by. Have we not felt this before only to then learn, oh, they are an average, everyday asshole, just like the last one. Just like us.

Another person cannot be the object of this intense desire for long without a.) failing and b.) failing.

“All is right in the world, just by the simple touch of your hand. I miss you baby!”

A fetish is something, not always perverse, that takes the place of another object that is too painful to have close. A man may seem fine after the death of his wife but he cares for his deceased wife’s cat with extreme finesse. Weird right? But not alarming. However, when the cat finally dies he loses it. Really loses it because the cat became a fetish disavowal. A stand in to keep the real and excruciating pain of his wife’s death from impacting him. The fetish helped him maintain. You might think thats a good thing. Hey, he made it to work, ensured the kids were ok, even seemed pleasant at a party. 

But like the above ad we are dissecting, it (the fetish with new man lover) isn’t real. The compulsion is to avoid not just loneliness but the despair of who we are/who we are not.

All in all I counted 16x you used the words ‘Me’, ‘I’ or ‘my’. So this post is really about you. Not your beloved. 

Notice when the words relating to others is used, like the word “you” its not about them but STILL about yourself. Gotta love narcissisms resilience as we never learn a thing about the ‘you’ person that this post claims to be all about!

“You...in my head”
“You...have me twisted”
“You...in my life”
And “You...I find myself”

 So Marco Polo goes to Java, and sees a one horned horse, and figures, hey, it's a unicorn. Fucking A! But it was a rhinoceros. Marco Polo wasn't a dummy, because he had to make a choice: either he modified his understanding of unicorn to fit the animal in front of him, or else he would have to believe he discovered an entirely unknown animal.

We make a similar choice every day, about everything. We are trained to care only about identity. What is my motivation in todays scenario we wonder internally, constantly. Who am I today? What do I want to be? Who would help my identity by being next to me?

It never occurs to us to say, what can I do for them? How might I act to make their lives better up to and including sacrificing what I might want?

Choosing to be just one thing, with all our will, despite resistance internal and external remains the rhinoceros that we cannot name.

N.