"All You Need Is Love"

So said The Beatles. But other groups disagree: "Love Stinks", "Love Hurts", "Love is a Battlefield". Who's right? Who's wrong? Both and neither.
Love, in the same day, can be our greatest joy and our greatest pain. After food and shelter it's our greatest need. Yet, at any given moment, at any period of time, many of us can't find it, or, having found it, find it fleeting. We kill for love, love kills us. Love conquers all, love conquers you. We give it and get nothing in return. We sacrifice everything for it and wind up with nothing.
Occasionally, it works. We fall in love and it lasts.
Today is Valentine's Day, which, along with Mother's Day and Father's Day, is another stupid, once-a-year
commemoration that's meaningless to all but the clueless and telephone, chocolate and greeting card companies.
Social pressure, corporate profits and media madness strike again.
But what about the real thing? Real love. The love expressed in 90% of music, literature, philosophy, art.
Does it exist? Can it ever be "real"? And how do you know if it is?
You don't.
Just as you can't really ever completely know anybody, the one you love will always remain a mystery.
Does he/she or doesn't he/she? It's a gamble. And, like most gambles, it's based on nothing more than a feeling. A hunch. A racing heart. A fire down below.
It's scary. It's risky. Could even be dangerous. But if you find it, and it's real, it is all you need.
So be brave. Go for it!
And don't save it for Valentine's Day.

We're All Human

It's 2010 and relations between men and women are worse than ever. The only men and women who seem genuinely "happy" are gays and lesbians. For the rest of us, single or married, every day signals another battle or loss. After 40 years of feminists vs. male chauvinists, working women vs. working men, soccer moms vs. soccer dads, Mars vs.Venus, equal pay for equal work, stay-at-home dads, greater educational opportunity for both women and men, post-feminism, on-line dating, speed dating, couples therapy and a million books and articles about how to get a man, get a woman, get a life, one "wrong" look or word can trigger anything from raging arguments to murder.
What hath society wrought?
To many, problems between men and women are as old, and predictable, as Adam and Eve. After all, we're
totally different species, right? Men want the toilet seat up, paper over. Women want the toilet seat down, paper under. There's no rhyme or reason, it's just the way it is, we're different. Mars and Venus.
Men like football, video games, cheeseburgers and gratuitous sex. Women like the arts, cooking, romance, and meaningful sex. Or so the cliches go.
But neither gender is a cliche, though almost everything we're taught about each other as kids, from our parents to the media's relentless bombardment, says we are. Sure, through "enlightened" communication and experience, we can diminish the "differences", but for too many of us, men are men, women are women, and never the twain shall meet. (For the record, most singles stay together less than a year and the divorce rate is still 50%).
So how do we bridge the gender gap?  I say, forget about gender. Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus. We both live on planet Earth. And until we see, feel and understand each other as human beings, with all our gifts and faults, nothing's going to change.
To take it a step further, let's deal with each other as individual human beings. Nothing is sillier than hearing someone say, "I love women" or "I love men" or the converse.
Stephen Stills got it right: "Love the one you're with".

The Pursuit of "Happiness"

About twenty-five years ago I was having lunch with my friend Brad at an Irish bar on Second and 51st. Brad, originally from Troy, NY, had gone to Virginia as a History major, then taught high school there
after he graduated.  While teaching, he wrote a history textbook that Virginia secondary schools are probably still using. At the bar, he was an ad copywriter like me, working at the same agency as my ex. I liked Brad the minute I first met him, and besides being one of the nicest people I ever met, he was also one of the smartest.
As was our habit, between bites of our cheesebugers and gulps of Guinness, we discussed the state of the world, the nation and whatever movie, book or hot piece of ass we'd happened to encounter. That day, discussing early American history, I came up with a theory. Call it "Jefferson's Biggest Mistake". As the author of The Declaration, as the most brilliant and polymathic mind of his time, one phrase of his, I suggested, has created more psychic pathology, more envy, more greed, more selfishness than any single phrase in American history: "...and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS...".
"Life, Liberty...", yes. Absolutely. Those first two words are what this country was founded on. But "the pursuit of happiness" was just wrong-headed, and ill-fated, right from the get-go.
Let's start with the word "happiness". "Happy", the adjective from which "happiness" derives, is
a poor substitute for the word "joy". Happy is sappy, joy is JOY! Joy is intense but momentary, like life. Happy implies lasting joy, unlike life.  Ask any European what "happy" means to them and they'll laugh in your face! It's just a silly, naive English (American) word. "Happiness" goes even further by implying a state of being. There is no such "state of being". Unless we all walk around with smiley faces like some mass asylum for village idiots! Couple "happiness" with "the pursuit of" and substitute "happiness" with "money" and you've got what America has become: Greedy, selfish, arrogant, envious, ruthless, delusional, intolerant, priggish, small-minded, profit-seeking at any cost.
Sure, there were, and are, millions of enlightened Americans who don't equate "happiness" with "money" or accept the word "happiness" as some sort of entitlement. But the few who don't are massively outnumbered by those who do, the rich and powerful, the poor and powerless. Brad thought my analysis was "brilliant". Maybe.
But twenty-five years later, "brilliant" analysis is less meaningful than ever. Every damn aspect of this culture has gotten worse. From Reaganism to Wall St. to political corruption to George W. to Cheney to Iraq to
Afghanistan to the Great Recession to "reality shows" to Fox News to "celebrity idolatry" to Facebook to Twitter to the death of music and publishing and reading to Tea-Party Republicans to a "do-nothing-in-spite-of-Obama-Congress" to "is-there-anyone-out-there-with-a-functioning-brain?", this country is a festering dunghole of misanthropic ooze. I got mine, loser. Fuck you. I got squat, dickwad. Fuck you, too.
Happiness! Pure unadulterated, unalterable, unreasonable, unsubstantiable, unconscionable happiness!
Ah, Tommy, you must be rolling in your grave!