“Listen, Larry,” you say, doing your best to coat your singsong with a with a husky phlegm, “it just isn’t going to work out with you and me.”
“Work out?” He seems genuinely puzzled.
“Yes, you know, isn’t going to lead anywhere.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised where it might lead.”
“I bet I would. But it isn’t I mean, as a relationship, it has zero future.”
“Future? Oh, I get it. You mean you don’t foresee a pot of gold at the end of our juicy rainbow. You mean that our intimacy isn’t likely to yield a dividend.
You disappoint me, Gwendolyn. I hoped you might have a watt or two more light in your bulb than those poor toads who look on romance as an investment, like waterfront property or municipal bonds.
Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn’t have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance ‘lead anywhere?
Passion isn’t a path through the woods. Passion is the woods.
It’s the deepest wildest part of the forest; the grove where the fairies still dance and obscene old vipers snooze in the boughs.
Everybody but the most dried up and dysfunctional is drawn to the grove and enchanted by its mysteries, but then they just can’t wait to call in the chain saws and bulldozers and replace it with a family-style restaurant or a new S and L.
That’s the payoff, I guess. Safety. Security. Certainty.
Yes, indeed.
Well, remember this, pussy latte: we’re not involved in a ‘relationship’, you and I, we’re involved in a collision. Collisions don’t much lend themselves to secure futures, but the act of colliding is hard to beat for interest.”
Tom Robbins, Half-asleep in Frogs Pajamas
Last Updated on October 14, 2012 by Bjorn Solstad