I shove my carry on baggage into the overhead bin and take my seat next to an older gentlemen. I pull my laptop out of its sleeve and go to work on the dream.
The older gentlemen smells like a distillery and introduces himself to me. We exchange names and a few pleasantries, before he asks me what I’m working on. I politely snarl at him, “I’d love a little peace and quiet sir.”
He got the hint and started in on the passenger to his right, who told him he would love to get a little sleep before sticking his earbuds in with a slight grin.
“Do you know what word it is that we use too much of these days?” asked the bitter old man to no one in particular, except maybe the air we breathe itself?
“What word is that sir?” I asked him somewhat inspired.
“Love,” he said with a low growl, before continuing, “the word is absolutely useless these days, people don't even know how to use it right anymore.”
Great.
Here I am.
Five hours on a red eye flight to some place I’ve never been before and I have the pleasure of sitting next a clinically philosophical cynic, who smells like some concoction of seasonal depression, doubt and a hint of two day old stale Basil Hayden's.
“Are you a judge, or something along those lines?” I ask him.
“Hell no, not at all. The absolute furthest thing from it,” he says with a slurry speech that sounds like he’s speaking hieroglyphics in cursive. “I’m just a pax tayin citizen.” He hiccups, “and a cliterary litic to boot.”
“That’s cute,” I smirked.
The man continues in his cursive tongue, “in this great country tis of thee, we say we love tacos, we love peace and quiet, we'd love a little sleep, we love cheeseburgers, we love this, we love that…it’s just doo tamn strong of a word to be used so lightly and freely…”
“Well, it bears an interruption in your confusing thought process sir, that if loving tacos and cheeseburgers is wrong, then allow me to never want to be considered right.” I say, as he stands up to go to the bathroom, mumbling something incoherently in hieroglyphics as he haphazardly stumbles away.
Anyways, to stay consistent with the flight pattern of this post, I one hundred and one percent disagree with so and so literary critic.
Not only because as he’s making his way to the restroom, he stumbles into the shoulders of most every innocent passenger on board this plane like a drunken sedated elephant.
But also because I just adore saying the word “love.”
For some reason, it's my most favorite fucking word in the Webster’s dictionary.
For example: I love chicken and dumplings. I love the Atlanta Braves. I love sunshine. I love Lake Tahoe. I love hot showers on cold mornings. I love fishing for words. I love ice cold showers on hot days. I love a good night’s sleep with way too many vibrant dreams about surfing on Saturn’s rings. I absolutely love the album Troubadour by JJ Cale. I love a fresh six inches of snow on the mountain. I love shoveling that snow to go create what they call cold smoke. I love women who flirt using only their eyes and a smile. I love body language, eye contact, vintage typewriters, bbq smokers, raging campfires, fly-fishing at dusk, and the white noise of a fan on full blast at night.
Or, how about the way a full moon crawls beyond the horizon to take a dip in Lake Tahoe well before dawn, as the sun wakes up before half of the the world is even awake. That’s something worth loving is it not?
Yes indeed, I love all of that.
I also love freshly sharpened pencils, stray coyotes in my front yard, the owl that visits my rooftop three times a year.
I love poetry. I love blank pieces of paper. I love cooking spaghetti for breakfast. I love taking up close and personal photos of the moon. I love cooking things up just to burn shit down. I just love creating things and dreams from scratch altogether.
And I’m just getting warmed up.
I love my mother, her name is Linda. I love my little sister, her name is Kayla. I love my little brother, his name is Hunter. I love my stepfather, his name is Larry. I love my niece. Her name is Taylor. She just turned sixteen a little over a month ago, which makes me feel really fucking old by the way.
I love my work family, one of my ex wives even. I love my friends, both old and new. I love the other side of the family I hardly even know, wherein which my last name comes from. I love my father. They call him Eddie, but his real name is Everett, which is also my first name.
And if there is in fact a word stronger than love, I’d say it to Harley, my son, a thousand times a day and then some. As it stands now though, I just call him kiddo.
I also love a really good authentic heirloom bolognese with some fresh handspun pasta.
And please pardon my Italian, but a man like me would travel to the ends of the fucking earth, or just some borough right outside a of a really big city for some as it stands at this precise moment in history.
There are simply not enough words in this universe that can convey the way I feel about such yumminess.
Goddamnit, Mr. Critic. I know you think you are much smarter, older, and wiser than me, and maybe you are. But if you were to see it for yourself from a place of empathy before you go and turn bitter about the word and the world, I don’t believe we say “love” near enough.
I think we should say it to strangers more. Hell, I think everyone in the world should hear it as much as possible.
Telling someone you love them, or what they do, has a way of exposing not only their own, but also, your very own heavenly soul.
And I wish more folks were brave enough to expose themselves, to feel it, to exemplify it, and to say it out loud for the fucking universe to hear a whole helluva lot more often.
You know, I once knew a man who claimed he didn’t hear the word, love, in his younger years as much as he would have liked to. At least not that he himself could remember. So he almost gave up on it, and himself for that matter.
Later on in life though, that man promised to his own Piscean son that he’d use the word as often as he could on the world and those living in it.
And so he did. In fact, he used it so much that he felt like he sometimes overused it.
I miss that man most days.
Because as it happens, I loved him with all of my heart. Yet, somewhere along the way I forgot how to say it to him whenever looking into the mirror.
So maybe, just maybe, mister cliterary litic, it's not exactly been the most well-received word of the past few years, or hell, the past decade or two, at least not according to cynical literary critics.
After I finished up washing my hands and staring long and hard at red eyes in a little mirror after taking a piss, I realized something really rather significant on the way back to my seat.
I do. I like.
No, I take that back.
I love, saying the word love way too fucking much.
With all of the pain in my poetic heart, I really really do.
And so it is when taking my seat on this astral plane of dreams, I don’t care who and the hell you are, or if you think we use the word too much, too little, or whether or not you believe in it, or me for that matter.
I one hundred and one percent, love you too, even if I don’t always know how to spell it out quite so clearly for you.
But for now, if you’ll pardon me for minute as I put my earbuds in.
It’s a long damn flight and I should probably get a little sleep while I've got the time.
So until the next time, I leave you all with a lovely little song.
Cordially,
Ryan
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