Blog Topic Generator & Thoughts on Luuurve...

So, like, I've mentioned before that I suffer from depression. I've been in a social media/life funk. Haven't been Facebooking, haven't been blog, reading, haven't been writing. Been watching a LOT of Hulu, though, which is about as helpful as a coma. Anyway, I took April off blogging and am having a really hard time getting back into the swing of things. Want to get back to regular weekly blogging, in the hopes that any kind of creative writing will prime my fiction-writing pump, as it were. But I've really no desire whatever to even think up a topic, much less write something worth reading about it. The weekend melted away and Monday, my supposedly regular day for my weekly blog post, loomed. WTF could I do in the remaining hours of Sunday to light a fire under my blogging ass?

I could Google "blog topics."

And I did.

That search turned up Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator. There, you provide three nouns you want to write about and the site spins out five blog post titles to aid in lighting a fire under your blogging ass.

Who the hell knew such a thing existed? Well, I do now.

The words which immediately came to me were, unsurprisingly:

• Love
• Man
• Sex

Because yes indeed, folks—I have a one-track mind. (Hey, there's something to be said for consistency, OK? Gimme a damn break.)

One of the five resultant titles did capture my imagination, and it was this:

What Will Love Be Like in 100 Years?

My initial response was, "The fuck should I know?"

But then the gears got to grinding (in my brain, people, not in any tawdry devices you may be envisioning) (more's the pity), and it seemed to me that, while technology, gender roles, and hairstyles may change (and thank GAWD they do), love never does.

Right? I mean, how love is expressed will vary: culturally, generationally, socio-economically, and even within the course of any given relationship. But we all still express love, don't we, on some level, to some degree? The ways love messes with your mood doesn't change: we can still ride the roller-coaster from caring, to lust, to fury, to worry, to caring again in, like, 3 seconds flat.

That love guides behavior, such as setting your cap after a love object, making some kind of commitment, maybe building and filling a nest, has been true for thousands of years, y'all. I can't see it changing, like, ever.

Can you?

What love is...

By Durdana shoshe (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

In a previous post, I bitched about how ruinous loving is. And it is.

But that's not all it is.

In my late 30s, I began to draw parallels between romantic and paternal love. Not in an Oedipus/Electra kinda way, 'cause that's gross. The love my parents (who are not perfect people) show me and my sis, and even more, the love I feel for my son, is straightforward and manifests in obvious ways:

The Feeding of My Obsession (With Tuneage)...

By Filthy cat (Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

So, like; last post, I did a Goth/Emo morph and laid my heart bare (a bit), revealing that I regularly feel besieged by hostile, even evil, forces, seeking my ruination. Which was loads of fun. Today I'll peel back another layer, with a closer look at the heartache I've hinted at but not fully explained. But, you know, there's music coming with that, which should take the edge off...

Streaming Consciousness: The Kid

...So many responses to my most recent post center around the essential "Holy fuck, not Putin?!" theme, yet no one commented on the fact that my Kid's due to go to Russia next week, for a month-long stay. Perhaps y'all were so tightly clutched in the grip of horror at my taste in man-candy that this salient fact escaped you. Never mind. I've nerves of steel and feel perfectly blasé about the fact that it'd take me 10 hours and over a thousand bucks to get to Balthazar in the event of an emergency, from June 12 to Bastille Day.

...I'm clearly lying about that last bit. I plan to tipple steadily throughout the day this coming Wednesday, the day the Kid embarks on his trip, so I can just not give a shit that he's flying an airline I've never heard of before and will be almost completely out of reach till mid-July.

...Balthazar's girlie and some of her fam were in Europe themselves recently and had a brief layover in Manhattan yesterday on their way home, so he and I went downtown to say howdy. When Balthy and his gal reunited, I was struck by how much love for him poured out of her eyes. My next thought, which haunted me for the rest of the day, was how painfully vulnerable we become when we love and how easily our beloveds can destroy us. (What the Kid's initial response was to her I can't quite tell you, as I deliberately turned away so they could suck face in relative privacy.)

...The Kid finished his first year of college! Holy shit! I'm happy to report that I'm over the devastation of Empty Nest Syndrome and have come to enjoy the freedom of not having to rush home from work every day to care for my not-so-little birdling. I'm enjoying the weird journey from Goth Mom to Goth Mom Lite and rediscovering myself as just a chick again.

...Balthy's got way more clothes than I do. Waaaaay moooooooore. And that pic doesn't show even half of his crap. Who the hell's got time for that much laundry, ain't nobody got time for that! (The Kid obviously doesn't, else his threads wouldn't be in a mound on the floor, awaiting the tender mercies of Tide.)

What is love...?

"...love is desire sustained by unfulfillment." ~ Angela Carter


“Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell, where pleasure, pain, and sad repentance dwell.” ~ Richard Barnfield


"Love is a grave mental disease." ~ Plato


Baby, don't hurt me...


"Love isn't a battlefield, it's a genocide." ~ Balthzar, The Kid


"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." ~ Matt Groening


...don't hurt me...


"Love is so short, forgetting is so long." ~ Pablo Neruda


“A mighty pain to love it is, and 'tis a pain that pain to miss; but of all pains, the greatest pain, it is to love, but love in vain.” ~ Abraham Cowley


"...love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*." ~ Ronny Cammareri, Moonstruck


...no more.

The Dark Romance of A...

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All She Wants Is ~ Duran Duran 

I didn't think the song was about sex (which is weird for me, as I see sex in everything, practically) (which can make Open House attendance at my Kid's high school a bit awkward), I just thought the sexy, synthy bassline fit in with my Blogging from A to Z Challenge 2012 theme of songs I find passionate/darkly romantic/simply romantic/just plain dark/sexy woof! My Dear Friend Nikki noted that, in fact, all the titular "She" actually wants is more nookie (for which I can't say I blame the gal). However, I feel I must point out in rebuttal that, in the video (click on song title to view), what the chick's got hanging from her bedroom wall are shoes, which just goes to show that Duran-squared (one of my fave bands in the whole wide world) have a deeper understanding of the feminine mind than I thought. 

All Through the Night ~ Cyndi Lauper

I'm not one for sappy, sentimental ballads, but the sweet, loving longing in this tune disarms my natural defenses against schmaltz, every time I hear it. (And no, She Bop will not be putting in an appearance when we get to "S" - it'd just be too damned obvious.)

Ain't No Easy Way ~ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (BRMC)

The opening lyrics of this song summarize my essential view of love - "It's easy to fall in love, when you fall in love, you know you're done." Amen, Brother. A-men. (Also; Peter Hayes = le woof!!!)  ::swoons::

Blog, the First

Some...

...girls are bigger than others?

...day, someway, maybe I'll understand you?

...people dance cheek to cheek?

...like it hot, and some sweat when the heat is on?

...times the truth is harder than the pain inside?

Dark...

I first became aware of mortality, generally, and of my own in particular, when I was about five. I was in kindergarten at a Catholic school and, as my classmates speculated about that spring's Easter Bunny haul, I was haunted by the "Davey and Goliath" Easter special, in which Davey's grandmother dies, which I seem to recall thinking was pretty messed up. (GAH, just watching this clip tied my stomach in knots.)

Anyway, my mind's traveled a gloomy trajectory ever since, though I prefer my doom with a liberal dose of L.O.L. (I adore "Shaun of the Dead"). Also, I prefer supernatural monsters to psycho-killers (though the Talking Heads tune is groovalicious), 'cause they're, like, totally not real. Probably. Anyway, as time goes by and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune perforate my poor, tortured psyche, I find I gravitate even more closely toward that which is...well, dark.

Romantic...

I gravitated toward books at an early age too - possibly, my first literary obsession was the Nancy Drew series. Sure, I enjoyed a good, neatly resolved mystery, and how could I fail to love that it was the chicks who figured everything out??? But, being completely honest, the thing that absolutely drove me to read more, more, MORE was the hope that something...special would happen between Nancy and her boyfriend Ned. I wanted their love to blossom. At the tender age of 9 or 10, my sweet, school-uniformed, unquestioning-obedience-to-authority, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth self wanted Nancy and Ned to...put on some Marvin Gaye. (I had no idea what this meant back then, and yet somehow, I kinda did.) And beneath what I sensed was a physical event I believed should lie a grand, passionate, everlasting love...and since Nancy had it all, I wanted it for myself, with one whose heart could match the nobility of my own.

So, as dark and somewhat twisted as I am, the romantic in me allows hope to dance her dangerous way through my heart...which brings me here to pollute the world with my nonsense, 'cause, you know, all the other kids are doing it.