love, inc.

Love is all around - no need to waste it, goes that familiar charmer of the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme.  The Troggs (and later Wet Wet Wet) felt that abundance in their fingers and their toes.  Ever the common theme of interest to poetry folk, moviegoers, and many in-between, all I need do is look on my iTunes and find a seemingly endless string of love songs - love from this angle, love from that. As cliché as it is, this is a core human emotion. Till the dusk of time one might expect us to continue to be falling in, puttering out, or some variant in the general vicinity. The world just looks different through its lenses. Love comes fast, love comes quick, and it comes in colors we don't expect to wear.

Recently I re-watched When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle with my girlfriend. My first experience with the latter was on the big screen during a date with a girl in high school. She was my first love. I had harbored deep feelings, admiration, and crush-worthy lusting before in varying degrees, but this was the young woman that drew me to poetry writing, shedding of happy tears, and yearnings to simply share some of the same oxygen. It was the first time I felt such intensity for another person. To me, it was serious.


Back then promo-trailer worthy lines like it was magic or it's like coming home were phrases that felt like Nora Ephron going into her cheese cabinet for a look. After seventeen years and volumes of life experience, some of this really resonates with how I feel about the woman I have recently fallen in love with (or as Closer would suggest: chosen). We are both arriving at this moment out of splintered marriages, which are both currently hitting the paperwork phase. For a time we fought back our feelings, but ultimately kept stumbling into the feet of the big elephant in the room.

beetle mania

Last night while I was working behind the car rental counter, I was in the midst of checking a customer’s vehicle back into the system, I caught a glimpse of something dark in my peripheral somewhere along this place's nasty carpeting. A quick glance back down and I noticed it to be some sort of insect. A cockroach, probably. Doesn’t it just figure in such a squalid and psychologically bereft place as this?

I took a second glance while finishing up with the customer and I saw the thing make a sharp turn in my direction. It now seemed to be hauling ass. It was then that I realized it wasn't some roach, but one of those cool looking black horned beetles. And it seemed to have trekked ten feet in ten seconds flat. Soon enough it was making its way across the toe of my shoe. It seemed so drawn to me. A part of me wanted to draw attention to this incident to my customer, but truth be told most people would be quick to suggest ‘squashing the damn thing’ rather than see significance in these type moments.

Once I was inclined to ask a customer where they were from, because I saw they were born literally a day before my mom. I thought perhaps a happenstance was at hand. Who the hell knows because this man seemed more irritated that I asked than much else?

Sure, some people just like to use the device for its main utility without having any insight into how it works. I don't want to miss the nuance. It's like eating pistachios. The simple process of removing the shells to get to the good stuff is part of the enjoyment. I say, life is better with the shell.

So, as soon as my counter cleared I pulled out my cellphone and googled 'beetle symbolism' and discovered many references to rebirth and the like. As I approach the last day on the job at the airport, I do feel like I am breaking out of a shell, moving from this metaphoric purgatory on to the next … phase.