Take Stock Week Day 4: Love Is All You Need

Cape Point Smoochers
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

It is Day 4 of Take Stock Week at Great Plotnik Headquarters and Meatball Kitchen, and Plotnik will admit he's getting bored with the whole process, and strongly doubts pontificating like a blind rabbi is making it any easier to find his way all the way to October 26. Nonetheless, children, today we shall remember that All You Need is Love -- Love is All You Need.

It's true, it's true. The trouble isn't needing love though, it's getting it. People often feel unloved, or better yet, underloved; disrespected, or more likely not respected enough. Finding the right mate is a matter of good timing most of all, with large portions of luck involved. But you've got to be ready for it, and you've got to want to be loved - uh uh, not (assume Eric Cartman Voice): 'ooh, I'm so lonely, I want to be loved yadda yadda.' You've got to WANT it. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Do you really want to make the effort to love back? It can be exhausting. How sure are you that you want to let someone else get close enough to find out about all your secret places? It's easy to fall fall for your beautiful eyes and your razor-sharp wit, but you're pretty damned moody and your expectations are 'way too high, you assume the worst about people and in your heart of hearts you probably don't think you're all that hot anyway -- right?

When he was a young Plot, The Great Plotnik went out with poetry girls, long blonde hair trailing behind their trilling voices, girls who confused his pretty music for his unburdened heart: in other words, women who were easy to fool.

The Great Ducknik was unfoolable, though. If Plotnik, at age 18, or 20, or 22, had filled out a questionnaire which asked the most desirable traits he would seek in a mate, he would hardly have thought about including self-reliant, brilliant, feet-on-the-ground or reliable in a crisis.

Beautiful, yes, he would have thought about that, and he's sure somewhere in some subconscious, primordial gland in his monkeybrain, Plotnik realized right away that Ducknik might make one crackerjack potential mother of his children. Nonetheless, he was amazed at how fast he fell -- and he fell first. Ducknik took more time. She was not convinced. In some ways, she might still not be, and, you can trust ol' Plot on this: she is still extremely hard to fool.

There is always something each partner in a relationship knows about his mate that he or she is the most self-conscious about -- her height, his hair, her lack of education, his lack of education, she doesn't dance, he doesn't make enough money. You can disagree about anything you like, but you know where that line is. Don't cross over it. Once you do, you can't ever go back. And it's never an accident.

Kids are wonderful, but kids grow up and you're faced with the same old face on the other side of the bed. Plotnik is very, very lucky because he still gets a chuckle out of Ducknik's sleeping dimple Not Such A Big Deal. He knows she'll be happy when she wakes up BIG Deal. But most of all, most most most of all, he's pretty sure that she knows him better than God and still loves him, even as he ages and his toenails get longer and nastier with each passing year.

Jesus, are we done? Good. Tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, we shall discuss something shorter, funnier, anything at all will do. Did you hear the one about the minister, the rabbi and the kanji leson?


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