So I have this unusually clairvoyant connection with the shuffle option on my I-Pod. A friend of mine maintains that this is no accident, but a part of some inauspicious marketing strategy by the Apple Corporation. Yes, apparently this strategy, my friend says, involves certain processing devices that are implemented so that we'll bond with the product through mechanical puppy love. (To reiterate, it’s his conspiracy theory. Not mine.) All I know is that from the moment I leave my door to hit the street, I can usually count on my “mechanical lovepet” to churn out the perfect playlist matching every change in the weather, location, disposition, etc. It usually succeeds at this with an almost eerie cinematic efficiency. This week is no exception. Which means the fact that “Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes starts to play every time I’ve seen an ambulance or run into an ex-lover is a little more than Tarantino-irony, baby. No, that’s just not good.
How many heartaches must I stand?/Before I find the love to let me live again?/Right now the only thing that keeps me hanging on/When I feel my strength, it's almost gone…/I remember mama said…
How did this song, probably somewhere in the Top 5 most recognized in the American pop-music catalogue, turn so suddenly into this colossally cruel, omnipresent warning of life spinning so terribly out of control? (For the record, it hasn't yet. At least I don’t think it has.) As an agnostic with no coherent sense of the rowdy spiritual forces that may (or may not) surround him, I tend more to lean towards recognition of the coincidental, the paradoxical, but mostly, if I’m being honest, the completely nonsensical. So when I hear the words “You can’t hurry love”, they forge themselves into an encrypted anagram which say: “Expect less, breathe more” or “Slow down, sugar… your youth ain’t up for bargain just yet.” A therapist might call this projecting. A prison guard or grocery clerk might call it keeping everything in check. I prefer to think of it more like a quick glimpse or two in the rear view mirror… looking back in a series of paranoiac spasms and pushing forward into a greater sense of becoming.
When I left home at seventeen, the objectives were simpler then. It was about going to school and meeting him, who would give me an internship here, where I’d secure a position, drop out of school and move there, which would supply me with enough opportunities and surrogate family to officially call that place home. It was about living in a constant state of arrival, which seemed at the time to be the only real way to find success in the world. A guy I dated briefly in college was similarly driven, hence Act III of our relationship ending in bloodfeast and fiasco. But it wasn’t until I laughed in his face when I heard him say: “Failure was not an option” that I understood the extent to which I’d been jinxed, tested, even scammed by these earlier ambitions. I had always known to some extent that talent and drive were, in themselves, insufficient. I had always known that the “getting there” would be a process, one which would inevitably consist of a lot of excruciating waiting. What didn’t occur to me is that this process would take its toll on one’s own survival to point where things like talent and ambition would be rendered irrelevant; you might even forget that these things existed in the first place.
The term “coming-of-age” is interesting to me. Some would say it signifies that defining part of a person’s life when all routes seem open, but no direction seems accessible. I would add that it’s also when a person reconciles him/herself to what the world is and is not, and their capacity to deal with those immensities and disappointments. But this Twilight Adolescence that everyone talks about in their early-twenties seems less innocent than the days when we were skipping gym and picking at our pimples. There’s more at stake when you fail, and as one of my character’s say “less room for you and your dream to walk the same street.” So maybe when Diana Ross and The Supremes were singing about “love” being “a-game-of-give-and-take”, what they were describing was the fight for self-affirmation, the fight for what our hearts deserve…
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