In the past, I regaled the occasional reader with my current love foibles, but now it would seem that I must go back into the Well of Despair and bring the water of insanity to all the thirsty readers.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott
I love quotes. I’m not the quote-hound that some might be. I’d much rather paraphrase the great ideas and thoughts of dead white people than spend a large part of my day meticulously memorizing who said, “Cap’n…there be whales here!” (Editor’s Note: Scotty in Star Trek 4) But the older I get, the more I fall in love with the delicious tidbits of quotable material that come my way.
I had known Ellie since I was in high school. Our love was like a delicious poison, that first taste of hemlock, that first smell of cyanide. We were too young to know it, but ours was that timeless blend of youthful exuberance and dime-novel melodrama. All the pretty prose in the world could not get us past the fact that we were both too fucking young to be “madly in love” with each other. Ah, to meet the younger me…I would have hit him in the head with a rake.
We couldn’t seem to maintain a relationship longer than a few months. Always during Thanksgiving would we seem to gravitate together, and as quickly as we shared our undying devotion to the other, we would make that fateful plunge into relationship retardation: fighting over how controlling my mother was or how tired I was about hearing how bad her ex-boyfriends were in bed. What was that quote about insanity again? Something to do with doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Screw that, there was pussy to be had!
So during our latest jaunt, I decided that to be truly free of the cycle we found ourselves in, I would have to be completely understanding and forgiving. No more silly fights, no grandiose explanations about how I couldn’t make the hour-and-a-half drive down due to a slight case of two term papers due. This would be my finest try for a woman’s heart that I never felt I could never let go of.
A few months into what we would later refer to as “Lucky #5”, I received an email from her ex-husband, telling me how they had seen each other, shared a tender moment, and even was nice enough to copy the emails she sent him. Have to say, I never felt so close to that unattributed quote “Bros before hoes.” I confronted her in the nicest way I knew how. Her tirade of denials notwithstanding, she eventually confessed to, yes indeed, lying to me. In some form of perverse logic that must have been spawned from my then desire to destroy all life on the planet, I asked her to please tell me any other lies that I might find out. The following would be my favorite quotes from that conversation:
“No, my ex-husband didn’t try to rape me. I was just drunk and we talked.”
“Those marks on my chest weren’t from the knife I said he tried to cut me with. I did those while I was talking to you.”
“I only cheated on my husband ONCE.”
“Denis? Yeah, I told him that God talked to me. I thought it would make our engagement go smoother.”
“Weston? Yeah, I just wanted to mess with him. That’s why I got myself committed after a fake suicide attempt.”
“Chris never beat me with a set of golf clubs. I just told his friends that after I fell down.”
As I sat there, watching the call counter on my phone tick toward the $600 mark, which I then wished I had put into a rake manufacturing company stock, I was struck by a myriad of emotions. The woman that I thought I knew for over 10 years was a habitual liar, and all of the effort and money that I had poured into this pit of bullshit had only produced a collection of batshit insane quotes and a couple hundred more miles on my car.
In retrospect, probably the most ironic quote would have to be, “I love you.”
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive” – Sir Walter Scott
I love quotes. I’m not the quote-hound that some might be. I’d much rather paraphrase the great ideas and thoughts of dead white people than spend a large part of my day meticulously memorizing who said, “Cap’n…there be whales here!” (Editor’s Note: Scotty in Star Trek 4) But the older I get, the more I fall in love with the delicious tidbits of quotable material that come my way.
I had known Ellie since I was in high school. Our love was like a delicious poison, that first taste of hemlock, that first smell of cyanide. We were too young to know it, but ours was that timeless blend of youthful exuberance and dime-novel melodrama. All the pretty prose in the world could not get us past the fact that we were both too fucking young to be “madly in love” with each other. Ah, to meet the younger me…I would have hit him in the head with a rake.
We couldn’t seem to maintain a relationship longer than a few months. Always during Thanksgiving would we seem to gravitate together, and as quickly as we shared our undying devotion to the other, we would make that fateful plunge into relationship retardation: fighting over how controlling my mother was or how tired I was about hearing how bad her ex-boyfriends were in bed. What was that quote about insanity again? Something to do with doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Screw that, there was pussy to be had!
So during our latest jaunt, I decided that to be truly free of the cycle we found ourselves in, I would have to be completely understanding and forgiving. No more silly fights, no grandiose explanations about how I couldn’t make the hour-and-a-half drive down due to a slight case of two term papers due. This would be my finest try for a woman’s heart that I never felt I could never let go of.
A few months into what we would later refer to as “Lucky #5”, I received an email from her ex-husband, telling me how they had seen each other, shared a tender moment, and even was nice enough to copy the emails she sent him. Have to say, I never felt so close to that unattributed quote “Bros before hoes.” I confronted her in the nicest way I knew how. Her tirade of denials notwithstanding, she eventually confessed to, yes indeed, lying to me. In some form of perverse logic that must have been spawned from my then desire to destroy all life on the planet, I asked her to please tell me any other lies that I might find out. The following would be my favorite quotes from that conversation:
“No, my ex-husband didn’t try to rape me. I was just drunk and we talked.”
“Those marks on my chest weren’t from the knife I said he tried to cut me with. I did those while I was talking to you.”
“I only cheated on my husband ONCE.”
“Denis? Yeah, I told him that God talked to me. I thought it would make our engagement go smoother.”
“Weston? Yeah, I just wanted to mess with him. That’s why I got myself committed after a fake suicide attempt.”
“Chris never beat me with a set of golf clubs. I just told his friends that after I fell down.”
As I sat there, watching the call counter on my phone tick toward the $600 mark, which I then wished I had put into a rake manufacturing company stock, I was struck by a myriad of emotions. The woman that I thought I knew for over 10 years was a habitual liar, and all of the effort and money that I had poured into this pit of bullshit had only produced a collection of batshit insane quotes and a couple hundred more miles on my car.
In retrospect, probably the most ironic quote would have to be, “I love you.”
