Ol’ Blind Joe

At school in San Francisco we had this reading module called SRA which was colour coded to indicate increasing degrees of complexity while you had to display your comprehension of stuff before moving on to the next colour.

Over the years, only this girl and I reached the colour purple and we playfully competed to the finish.

The thing was that I would regularly find my arts and crafts projects smashed to smithereens, and after school I had to figure out a new way to get home to avoid four kids who wanted to do the same to me.

Strangely, one of them was the quarterback of our gridiron football team who had hundreds of girls wanting him yet he’d rather beat the crap out of me – but he never did get me.

Here’s a stinky thinker: there’s been 154 mass shootings in the US this year and not one was committed by a black man or woman, or an illegal immigrant.

Nutjob theory

My theory is these nutjob killers haven’t read a book since kindergarten and are desperately angry/sad about their lack of applied intellect and are deeply resentful, hence schools are their favourite hunting ground.

When I was younger, two girls introduced me to an old shaman woman and after dinner she explained to me that my aura was yellow, meaning I was cerebral or more intellectually inclined rather than emotional.

I’ve found this also affects one’s lifestyle and while I have done much work with my hands, my preference is to read a good book or search the universe on the internet.

Love is an equally complex and perplexing subject with which I’m still grappling.

Women seem to think we’re bloody psychic and should already know what they’re thinking.

But us guys are stupid as shit and, depending on our natures, we’re quite happy to either work or study and stay out of their way when the moods get them.

So I grabbed some books, got a beer and sat at the back of the beer garden joining these two skeletons sitting quietly with a little plaque attached to the front of the table declaring they were going to sit here until they understood women.

French Romantic Movement poet and novelist par excellence Victor Hugo (1802-1885) wrote that the supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

I’ve always been amused by US comic strip character Charlie Brown’s observation that “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”

They say ‘follow your heart’, but if your heart is in a million pieces, which piece do you follow?

Sometimes I wish I was a little kid again – skinned knees are easier to fix than a broken heart.

German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote: “If I love you, what business is it of yours?”

Sweet scent

INSPIRATIONAL quote author Claudia Adrienne Grandi wrote “If I had a single flower for every time I think of you, I could walk forever in my garden.”

Love lingers like a sweet scent in an empty bottle.

American journalist and novelist Joan Didion observed this disorienting fact in her classic memoir of loss: “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.

“And when it does come, it unweaves the very fabric of our being.

“When love is lost, we lose the part of ourselves that did the loving — a part that, depending on the magnitude of the love, can come to approximate the whole of who we are.”

Often it’s the small things we miss the most, such as being hugged, which leads to the release of the hormone oxytocin, setting off a range of downstream outcomes.

Oxytocin is involved in a complex range of social processes but has been implicated in romantic bonding and trust, and floods a mother’s body before and after giving birth.

India’s Mother Teresa said: “The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread”.

I remember laughing when Hawkeye from the US movie and TV show M*A*S*H said: “Without love, what are we worth?

Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.”

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. – French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880).