Love and Skunks

So many things that we want out of life are always just out of reach. If you read Shakespeare’s love sonnets, they are about a woman (or man?) who is ideal but unattainable. Inspiring and impossible. Good for provoking poetry in whatever world where your idea of perfection exists, but inaccessible in the world of the actual. The literary term for this is “the petrarchan woman.”









It’s like letting a hamster run around in one of those clear plastic balls in a room full of cats. No matter how much those cats want to eat that delicious hamster, no amount of pawing at it will afford the snack. The petrarchan hamster. Or maybe our ideal lives are running around in an impenetrable plastic bubble.

Maybe that’s why I write. Just one less degree of separation between my actual and petrarchan lives. Maybe I can’t eat the hamster, but writing gives me the opportunity to at least smell it. And it smells good.

I have a hard time thinking of the ideal woman that would be perfect for me. Apparently Shakespeare did too, since he was writing about someone. He needed inspiration. Any attempt at a relationship I’ve ever endeavored has just been an attempt to define the petrarchan woman, not to capture one. So my love life is like playing the lottery. No winners yet, just a lot of wasted dollars.

But petrarchanism is not limited to love or life plans. In fact, I think that it’s more appropriate for the little everyday expectations that we all experience.

Let’s make up a word! Micropetrachanism. Definition: ideal expectations for everyday, trite events. But that seems too long and difficult to spell / read, so let’s shorten it to “micro-p.” Yeah, that’s got a nice ring and suggestive tone to it.

Think sandwiches. I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten a sandwich that lived up to my expectations. It never looks like the picture on the menu or in my head. Has society ruined my sandwich experience by creating an image of sandwiches that is unfair or unattainable? It’s just like the media making teenage girls anorexic because toilets like Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton get so much coverage. Only I’m talking about sandwiches. Irony.

You know what vastly alters your micro-p? Alcohol. Expectations tend to be exaggerated or modified. Beer goggles, beer muscles, liquor haze. I like to self-medicate with alcohol to overcome my severe social anxieties.

Jay literally thinks that nothing can harm him when he’s had enough to drink. He eats Christmas ornaments and jumps off of balconies into bushes. Jump is the wrong word – it was more of a tuck-and-roll situation. Rocks’s only expectation for climbing a telephone pole as quickly as possible was applause from the crowd of people outside of a bar.

But the next morning is a shocking return to clear-thinking and more realistic expectations. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say. Eating glass leads to an odd prickly stomachache. Rolling off of a balcony results in the inability to lift your right arm in the morning and questions from your landlord about why his landscaping is destroyed. Pole climbs often result in a night in jail.

Have you ever made a drunken decision that you expected to turn out significantly different than what actually happened? Drunken micro-p.

Monday night. Jay and I are absolutely hammered. We stagger home from the bar and on the way in hear an animal surveying our garbage cans, which were right outside of Jay’s window and the front door. The smell indicated that our visitor was a skunk and our drunken micro-p led us to have a “good” idea. Let’s catch the skunk and let him loose in our neighbor’s apartment.

Drunk and giggly, Jay armed himself with some sort of box to trap our new friend in while I prepared to swing the door open. On three. 1. 2. 3! I swung the door open, but our curious little pet had been wise to our plan. There was the business end of the skunk, pointed directly at us, and he let us have it.

You know in cartoons when a skunk sprays and there is a giant green plume of smelly gas that fires out of his ass? That’s not so far from what happens in real life. It all happened in slow motion. A thick, greenish cloud of the stinkiest substance known to man released into the house and all over us. Astoundingly potent.

This may have been the hardest I’ve ever laughed. It smelled so terrible that it made our eyes water and the smell woke up our neighbors. We quickly scampered through the house to the back door, stripping our clothes off, laughing hysterically, and crying. It probably wouldn’t have been as funny if we were sober.

Our pants and shoes were never the same after that.

Micro-p. What you think is not ever what is. But idealism is a fucked up thing. Think of your patrarchan man or woman or hamster. Has it changed since you were younger? Is it possible without experience? How boring would life be if ideals and reality were the same? The difference between the two is the fun part of being alive. Adventure, drama, surprises, and skunks.

Learn what you can from the discrepancy and move forward. Don’t be the asshole that throws a fit on the waiter because your sandwich doesn’t look exactly like the one on the menu. When you buy a case of beer, lay out a change of clothes. And keep playing the lottery. Because hey, you never know.