01/13/2010

How to make love stay

This is from Tom Robbins, "Still Life with Woodpecker", a book I have loved for many years -- 15? 20? This is one of my very favorite passages. I've hand copied this onto slips of paper and used it for a bookmark, pinned it to bulletin boards and handed it to loved ones. 

Who knows how to make love stay?

Tell love you are going to the Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if love stays, it can have half.
It will stay.

Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new.
It will stay. 

Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep.
Love will be there in the morning.


__________________________
Jan 13, 2010 8:13:58 PM

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My definitive happiness quote Make yourself happy without hurting others, then help others be happy without hurting yourself. I saw this in the Sunday comics but despite its lowly origin, it has become something of a mantra to me. There's several key points here -- the priority (just like parents, children and airplane oxygen masks), the responsibility (for your own happiness), and the importance of not hurting yourself while helping others. All of which I have forgotten at one time or another. I can't find the comic on the internet. If you want to see it, just look on my fridge.
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We're all serial polygamists. Yes, even you. When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter. Tom Robbins

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Let it be recorded that at this moment, I am happy.

Anil Dash
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