excerpt from my novel American Emo

Chapter III




Love All Over (Dancin’ Til Dawn)



What is love? Well it use to be something worth having. It use to be something special between a man and a woman. Now it’s something completely different. It use to be something very distinct. Now it's something we throw around casually like a hello, a handshake or a smile.

Ever since the 60's we've slowly lost the true meaning of love. We've, piece by piece, lost the purest form of joy, the fresh-cut Colombian. We give and give what the hippies would have called free love, which basically means we sleep with everyone we can. That’s not love, that’s promiscuity. We have all these emotions that consume our body when we touch and kiss and we confuse these emotions with love, when these emotions aren’t really love at all. These emotions are not love, they’re Endorphins.

Endorphins are endogenous opioid polypeptide compounds. They are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during strenuous exercise, excitement, pain, death, and orgasm, and they resemble the opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a sense of well-being. Endorphins work as "natural pain relievers", whose effects may be enhanced by other medications.

The term "endorphin" implies a pharmacological activity (analogous to the activity of the corticosteroid category of biochemicals) as opposed to a specific chemical formulation. It consists of two parts: endo- and -orphin; these are short forms of the words endogenous and morphine, intended to mean "a morphine-like substance originating from within the body."

The term endorphin rush has been adopted in popular speech to refer to feelings of exhilaration brought on by pain, danger, or other forms of stress, supposedly due to the influence of endorphins. When a nerve impulse reaches the spinal cord, endorphins are released which prevent nerve cells from releasing more pain signals. Immediately after injury, endorphins allow humans to feel a sense of power and control over themselves that allows them to persist with activity for an extended time.

As a matter of fact, during orgasm, large amounts of Endorphins are dumped into the bloodstream, which gives the person achieving the orgasm a general feeling of euphoria and numbness, an effect similar to that of Cocaine and Heroin. So all the good feelings you feel from kissing and touching a person you’re attracted to, is not love, but simply chemical explosions inside your body. A simple human response.

Love is more than a simple human response. Love is powerful. Love conquers all. Love is the ultimate level of care and respect, not adoration and attraction. Love is deeper than that. Love is Real! Love is eternal. Love is fate. Love is Death.

Webster’s Dictionary defines love as; A strong affection for another, arising out of kinship or personal ties. This seems simple enough, right? The only problem is its not. Love is not easy. It’s really hard. It’s really hard to do when they don’t love you back. It’s hard when you love someone who constantly throws your trust away. It’s hard when they constantly cheat on you and treat you like shit because they can’t control a problem, their problem. It’s hard to love a monster.

The hardest part though is being that monster and knowing that you have damaged a person that much and they still love you. They still want you. No matter how much you kick ‘em in the gums they still come back to give you a kiss or suck your cock if desired. They always come back and why, ‘cause they’re a teenage girl in love and they will do anything to keep that love, because that love although putrid, crooked and fucked, is the only thing that makes them feel good about themselves. It’s the only thing in life that pays attention to them, the only thing that loves them.

When a fire becomes that big you can’t extinguish it. You have to just wait for it to go out. I waited for Tosha’s flame to die, but it never ceased. She still hasn’t found anyone. Of course that’s probably because she refuses to look. She believes God will magically place that person in front of her. God will find that person for you if you let him, but you still have to look. Asking God to find them doesn’t take you out of the equation; it just gives you the better vision you need to see the person you desire.

Most of the task of finding the right person lies within you, not the other person. If you’re not right, the person you find can’t be either. That’s why we have such a high divorce rate in America. People don’t want to fix themselves. They always think the other person is the problem. If something doesn’t “feel” right they think “It can’t be me. Must be my spouse” and they divorce them; meanwhile destroying their ability to be in a relationship forever. And God forbid the fuckers produce offspring. That’s another life of sadness and isolation chalked up to the failure to understand what a relationship is. Don’t make your children suffer for your mistakes. Don’t let your children become just another statistic in this God forsaken country.

I can’t take this shit anymore.