In the past, and particularly recently (with You Want Me To Emote About My Wife? Fine! Here It Is!), I've written about how in love I am with my wife Cat, and what a wonderful relationship we have and all that.

But just to be clear:  I fully comprehend that while love can be a many spendored thing, it's prone to becoming a many splintered thing. (Get it? Didya catch the word play? That right there's why I make the big bucks.) Love tends to fall apart. It's inclined to lose its integrity. Love does splinter; it gets under your skin; it hurts and wounds you. At the very least it so irritates the living daylights out of you that finally you have to dig it out of yourself or let it become a festering infection that kills you.

Love pretends it's real---but then can't endure. It's like a brand new, gleaming ocean liner on which you buy a ticket because with of all your heart you believe---because you know---that it's going to take you on the dreamiest, most perfect, most wonderfully exotic cruise anyone has ever been on.

And then, once you're out at sea, your own private Love Boat develops holes in its hull. And then it won't steer like it should. And then you end up having to work in its stifling engine room just to keep the thing moving and afloat. Finally it's nothing more than a leaking, listing mass of rusted, dented steel only a fool would ever climb aboard.

Right? And oftentimes by then you've been aboard the USS Daily Grind for so long that you're kind of stuck on the thing. You're too far out in the ocean to jump off and swim to any land. What are you, Flipper? You barely remember what land looks like. You wouldn't know a palm tree from a snow globe.

You're stuck, baby. It's just you, boundless churning salt water, and the Captain A-bad who's always stomping around on your upper deck, screaming orders that don't make any sense.

Um.

Yeah.

So there's a reality I could see us talking a bit about. Anyone interested?

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