Let’s make love

Love. Love is a wonderful and powerful thing. One minute, it can make you think you can fly, another, it can make you feel completely invisible. Under love’s influence, people have done some pretty crazy things, and even forgotten who they are once in a while. Love can scare the shit out of you and it can make you forget your own name. Despite all of this, love is something that can really open your mind, and can change the way you look at everything in your life.

Like most children, I walked in on my parents while they were making love a bunch of times. My parents were hippie-bikers, so they made a lot of love. Every time I walked in on them, they would act all embarrassed and tell me not to look, while they scrambled around trying to hide all of the containers of chemicals. It’s not like I was old enough to know what they were doing with all that stuff, but I think they knew that I would find out eventually.

It wasn’t until I was about 14 that I really figured things out. I walked into the washroom while my parents were right in the middle of making love. It was a really big batch, and they had it in the tub, so they could dip sheets of blotter paper into it. I asked them what they were making in the tub and they said, “Love.” That’s when I slipped and fell into the tub.

While my parents were drying me off, with what I’m pretty sure was a towel, but felt a lot more like a big fluffy slice of beef, I realized how strange cheese is. Not in the sort of way that you can explain with words, but rather the sort of way you can only express by looking a little freaked out while giggling. Then I thought about how cheese clogs your arteries, and decided suddenly that there is an untapped market for heart plumbers… Plumbers… Plumbers… That word sounded funnier and funnier to me the more I said it. Then I realized that even though plumbers are called plumbers, they don’t actually ‘plumb’ anything, and so I made a conscious decision to plumb more in my every day life, whatever that entailed.

When I finally came down from my first ‘love trip’ I was with my new foster parents. I didn’t know what to make of them at first, as I had never met anyone like them before in my life. My foster mom was a nice lady in a red shirt. All she kept saying to me was, “Sir, are you OK?” My foster dad was very stern. Has was red faced and threw up almost constantly. I decided to leave my new foster home after about only six hours, when I realized that my new foster mom was the 7-11 lady and my foster dad was a Slurpee machine.

Sometimes love hurts, but you know what they say: Better to have loved and lost…

J. Williamez is a local musician and might share some love with you if you go to Shannon’s Irish Pub on Monday night.

Published in Volume 63, Number 21 of The Uniter (February 26, 2009)

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