N&I JOURNALS : God, Rethink This Love Thing

When I think of it sometimes, it reminds a lot of the coke bottle that landed in the Kalahari desert in the “movies the Gods must be crazy” In the movie, a bottle tossed out through the a small aircraft, landed in the desert as the bushman watches and believes that it had been sent from heaven by the gods. In the beginning, the bottle was such a blessing to the primitive community. It made work around the place easy ... it pounded nuts and even helped do the laundry. This was until a fight broke out in the household over who should use the bottle first, and children got hurt in the scuffle. That is how I view teen youth sometimes. When it is being nice to you, you feel like walking around the hood singing aloud to Eddie Murphy’s rendition of “Oh, what a feeling to be loved” from his flick Coming to America. But then something happens and you ask yourself how a feeling so beautiful can cause so much pain, just ask Rihana! Look at babe or a dude foregoing meals. When you dig dipper, the cause is love. A dude spends sleepless nights and the cause; love. You find another buried in a bundle of blankets shivering like they have a fever. When the doctor’s results come back reading negative for fever, the conclusion is the same; Love. By the way, if you have never been lovesick or worse still, heartbroken, run fast and get vaccinated against it.I have not seen a worse disease. It is the one time you feel like walking into hospital and yell: “Just hospitalize me and kindly put me on Oxygen. No questions!” My rumblings do not in anyway, mean that I am down with symptoms. What I know is that when you are down with this sickness, you cannot lift a finger. I used to think that when people said things like “cry a river” or “cry a bucket,” they were joking. You can actually fill a bucket if you care to measure. So when does a thing meant to set butterflies fluttering become such a source of pain and frustration?The symptoms start slowly; first you stop calling them ‘honey’ to ‘Inno’. Three weeks later you do a further edit and delete ‘Dave’ and replace it with his full name, Ninsiima Innocent ‘i’. A month later, the name is ‘stress’ if it is there at all. Soon after, the complete bout hits: Running nose, constant wet and sore eyes and a hatred you never thought your heart could ever feel. Has anybody been there ... hello? This brings me back to The Gods Must Be Crazy. When the bottle became a problem, the guy who discovered it took it upon himself to return it to the heavens. He tossed it as high up as he could but the bottle kept stubbornly coming back for more. Just the way love does. When you realise that it brings nothing but trouble, you make a hasty vow, “I’ll never be in love again.” And two months later, you find yourself irretrievably in love again.The guy in the movie eventually embarks on a journey to the end of the world to try and throw the offending glass object off the edge of the earth. I don’t remember how the movie ends with the bottle. But do I hear any volunteers to kindly carry love off and hurl it to Mars so that we all just stay here, read our books and mind our plot? Ah! After all, this youth-age ‘love’ is nothing but puppy love. Ends