Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Mutual Assured Destruction

If all's fair in love and war, then treaties, it would seem, aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Still, it's always best, whenever possible, to act with the best intentions, and I've had enough Armageddons in my lifetime to be favorably inclined toward any type of detente. All of this is leading up to an interesting idea with which I've been presented, i.e., a pact to not fall in love. Never having been one to think particularly deeply during the headlong initial phases of, shall we say, human relations, I've always allowed my instinct to guide me. As I've never been the one to make the first declaration of love, then it would appear my timing is infallible. I judge my risk to be virtually nil, and have blithely entered into said intriguing pact. I've typically found initial skirmishes tend to be appropriately tentative, with careful feints and thrusts; it's the drawn-out engagements, it would seem, where the trouble comes in. I'm carefully considering a statute of limitations.

Leaving aside length of engagement, the battlefields of love, naturally, are lined with the weaponry of the previously fallen, and the temptation to scavenge arms grows more than strong as any war progresses. But heavy arms have never been my style; no, my friends, I think strategy is more for me, all the better as it doesn't mar my dashing silhouette. And so, I traipse forward in life, in a manner that no longer be described, at this age, as blithe, but rather a slightly neurotic lurching, content to be armed, as ever, with nothing more than a dangerous set of curves and, granted, a rather more twisted mind. The game, my dears, is at 30-love; the only problem now seems to be that I've lost track of who's serving.

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