Love is a drug from space.

Good evening you Pashas of passion,

Love.

What is it? Where do I get it? How much will it cost me and can I take it back if I keep the receipt?
It seems to me that the world in general bandies about the whole term love as if it were as concrete a term as concrete tern (on display at Apollo Bay's "Sea life In Building Materials" exhibition". Unmissable stuff.).

But, in fact, Love is one of those ephemeral ideas like a slippery Eel made from Teflon steam.
It's in fact a concept that really does belong with all those other concept albums, like Rick Wakeman's journey to the Centre of a busy Shopping Centre or Led Zeppelins famous "Chip" album recorded inside a frying potato so they didn't have to wait for Bonzo to snort his bag of crisps every five feckin' minutes and he could just chew on the walls between takes.

Love.
It's the emotional blouse that goes with everything else in out existence wardrobes. The little black dress of the soul. The comfy trakky daks of meaning.
We crave it like some magic shampoo that washes, dries and irons our sins away and gets the most stubborn regret build up off out eternal ovens.
We gussy ourselves up for it. We flog our balls senseless at gyms in order to look good for it.
We culture pearls in our brains with witty grit so we can splash out a giggly pendant of nous when it arrives.

We yak onto to our mates about it, sagely stroking our beards or adjusting our bras (or if it's love in the Circus, both).
We scoria up the driveway to our heart so the love can smirk on up in the big black cadillac of joy (that it reputedly gets around in) and we lay the table of our pink bits with luscious temptations, hoping love will drop by after the gig and dial up a big bowl of rooty snacks.

But what the fuck is this love? What is this shizzle that we all seem hell bent on smothering ourselves with?

In my darker, perhaps more cape wearing attitudes to love, I would make the pointy headed point that if love were a snuffling white powder it would be treated as a dangerous narcotic and you'd get 20 years in the slammer if it was found in your dandruff.

I'm giving a big honk on the sincerity horn here when I can honestly say I've seen more people lose there sweet muffined minds over-dosing on love than i have on any other drug/drink/ frog lick combined.
I would even go so far as to say that as you are reading this, you're getting that strange pang right behind your left tit that says "Yup, I once was so cactus on love I couldn't tell Cola from moose poop."

Face it. We've all been there.
Sitting there in some busted up dive with our droopy britches full of cheap bourbon, black and gold budget regret, strung out on love.
You end up such a basket case that every friend you have is faking death so they don't have to put up with your maudlin bunkum.
You're whole life has been ground down to the point where you're bin licking in the cancer ward, cursing he fact you're your own dealer and you've forgotten your own phone number.


You're going through the bad old heebie jeebies. You've had a hurtin' put on you.
You end up being in the horrible, desperate mind maze where all you wanna do is go back to that dark doorway, just get one more taste of that sweet, sweet blissful passion.......... but deep down in your Holy Soul socks you know you'll wake up the next day all bug eyed and goo goo brained with sticky regret, scratching your fanny balls in a beaded sweat and dreading going through it all again.

You might last that awful week we're your all strung out and your tongue is full of that mouse shit and burnt cardboard tasting pain that occurs when we walk away from loving some freak ,who wanted to "eat our livers together as sign of fidelity".
That monstrous body punching fortnight where the pink elephants of love piss hot detergent in your ears and you'd do anything to stop the pain, anything to feel that sweet needless euphoria, anything to become a blind ghost made from fairy floss at a family BBQ.

But is this love?

Some of you more stubborn types go down the old Hard Line Communist Road to Love, singing your encouraging songs until you end up snaring some character who's easy on the eyes and twitterpates your daphne sprizted heart.
You goose around for a bit, try each other on, wash the material a couple of times to see if it shrinks and if your not already pregnant by then, you shack up or go and ask some Guy in a Dress to ask God about the catering.
You do stuff and climb mountains and root in hot tubs. Then, if you haven't already had four kids, you have a kid. And another.
And it's all Love that's cranked you along to this point.

It's held you together when you had than barney in Prague where you rooted the crazy cat or kitten (or then cat first and then kitten. Then kitten on top and cat underneath. Then kitten with cat) after you to saw her posing naked for the Duke who was smearing assorted boobs with charcoal and money.
It held you together when even the letterbox smelt like baby shit and you ran away and slept on the roof just to have five minutes to your self.

But what is this love stuff that allows us to suffer such madness? Have a look out the window. You don't see stray dogs wearing baggy pants to get the girls nor do you see songbirds having breakdowns over nest rental.
They seem to do ok.

So let's get in the lab, fire up a beaker or two and poke a pipette up the meaning of love shall we?

One could look at love as a kind of toffee that glues together the working souls of people who end up have no further dreams in life other than to have someone to yell at over tea bag choice.

Perhaps this whole sticky Love mummery stems from when we were busy taming this planet, living in a bark huts made from dead fish and you simply needed someone to stick around for ages (or until you popped yer clogs) to collect the shit that dropped out of the arse of the domesticated plough animal so you could roll it into balls to sell at the highly lucrative shit market.

Maybe love is just a clever economic choice- One ploughs the fields. The other collects the shit. (Sounds like most double incomes I know. Except in the old scheme tax time meant pleurisy).

Was "love" then perhaps something our greedy brains started secreting so we could til the soil and the oblongata could stuff it's energising guts with double the pig sausage and flaked corn toast?
A sweet smelling collection of delightful chemical sluicings, luscious endorphins that stopped us from throwing rocks a each other and allowed us to to work together to create the majesty of the Pontiac potato and the plug in kettle?

Nothing more than a chemical bond our mammalian cerebellums conjured up when realised that in fact the insects were onto something and no matter how sexy you looked being a lone lynx , the only way we as a species was going to smash it's way to the top was to hook up in long lasting chemical chains of connections, nullify every primal urge we had to run away from the thing that was shitting us to tears and to stick together, forever, in order to leave our lawnmower collection to the kids?

Maybe Love is just a bunch of slick little excretions that Life (with a big L) started to put together once it realised that this Planet shits itself every million years or so and It really needed to somehow get the monkeys to pal up in order to build a fucking huge disco in space and get the funk out of here before the Sun goes Nova?

Are we just all taking out home loans and pretending to like each others televisions programs because Life (with a capital L) has gone back to the lab and smothered us with a Mecano of febrile pheromones so it can get the hell outta dodge and, for better or worse, richer or poorer, Fonzy or Potsy, it needs a bunch of crazy apes (that usually would be too busy throwing rocks and arse debris at each other) to get the hell outta the solar system pool before it all turns to a steamy piss jelly when the asteroid hits?

Is Life (with a large L) simply banging us together in order to complete it's evolutionary thesis? Are we the tools of Crazy Ol' Man Time who likes programs about things arguing and rooting? Is love the slim precipice between endless compromise and nuclear explosions?



I don't know. But I have my suspicions.............

Til next time

Mick "Loveknuckles" Dog.