And the Dream of What Love Could Be

I recently sold a house. In order to fully participate in the bizarre scrum that selling a house currently entails, I had to sign up for things like Zillow and Redfin and related stuff. Of course signing up for anything online these days is like going for a refreshing dip in a leper colony hot tub. You may get what you want, but you will get lots of other stuff. Every online thing is a daisy chain of opaque creepy businesses glomming on to your attention, and selling bits of it hither and yon.

So the house is sold, and it takes a while to unsubscribe to everything. The glitchiness of everything doesn’t help. I’m still getting monthly reports for some poor soul’s house who lived a couple of miles from me. You can’t unsubscribe from something you don’t have the credentials for. I could turn the chore into a full time job for myself for a short but enraging time, but I can’t be bothered.

So I still get these roundup email blasts from one or another of the real estate pixel pigpiles. They’re ostensibly supposed to send me listings I’d be interested in, but mixed in are sub rosa pitches for teevee shows I wouldn’t watch if I had a gun to my head, unless they let me finger the trigger myself. The other day, this jumped out of the browser and yelled BOO:

Join the club, pal, and I haven’t even seen the house. Do you people have any idea how crazy you look? How motherloving, Playdoh-eating, window-licking, batshit loony you’ve become?

This blog is not a public service. I am not going to find out what this program is about, or who these people are. I’ve read a lot of books over the years, including lots of fat, dusty ones about Greek and Roman gods, and Egyptian mummies and so forth. And it’s been a while, but I seem to recall that if you utter the incantation Shekinah Garner Sarper Guven three times during some sort of solstice, demons will be raised from the dead to walk the earth and steal naughty children, or sell worms to fisherman from their torso or something.

Wait, that can’t be right. Look at the picture. There must be some other incantation abroad in the land, because they’re the demons that got summoned, if you go by their appearance. I have no idea what the woman in the picture with the rubber raft for a face used to look like, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell me, but she must have once at least looked like a human being. If she was a leper, she’d look more human than she does now.

I doubt she looked like Donna Douglas when she started, but even if she did, I’m sure she wouldn’t run away when they took out the hyaluronic acid needle. She’d tell them to go back and get bigger needles, and more of ’em.

But of course I’m a soft touch. I want Shinola, er, Shadoobie, um, Shazaam or whatever her name is to be happy. That’s why I’d never mention to the young lady (she may be young, even though she wants to look like an old lady that wants to look young) that after catching a glimpse of  Saruman, er, Soapsuds, um, Scooby-Doo, or whatever his name is, before I could slam the laptop shut and plunge it into a bucket of water, that she reminds me of teen girls who had a crush on George Michael back in the day. I also never mentioned anything about Liberace to my grandmother, who died happier for my circumspection, I’m sure.

Look out, Shimmie Shimmie Coco Pop, er, Charlemagne, um, Shickelgruber, or whatever your boggle-loving mom named you. I fear you’re in for a rude, two-earring, puffed-puce-silk-pocket square, bugeyed, Freda Payne awakening.

But that night on our honeymoon
We stayed in separate rooms

Whatever girls are in charge of blasting out that email come-on for that cable show aren’t doing the cause any favors by using Photoshop to turn the weird up to eleven. Eyes have capillaries in them, yo. Best to leave them there, a bit. Use a thirty gallon drum of electronic Visine, and you end up with this:

I wait in the darkness of my lonely room
Filled with sadness, filled with gloom
Hoping soon
That you’ll walk back through that door
And love me like you tried before

To almost quote Yagoda, er, Yakov, um, Yoda: Try? There is no try, only do!

But even if I’m off the mark here, and this is true love, if you climb on top of most anything and it sounds like you’re hiking yourself onto a pool floatie, it’s bound to put any guy off his game. And the dream of what love could be.