Sibling Assignment #90: I'm a Long Term Dope

For our 90th Sibling Assignment, InlandEmpireGirl raised this question:

As Valentine's Day approaches, think of a specific film, book, poem, or work of art that helped you understand the emotion of love and explain why.

It was very melodramatic and totally fraudulent. It was so ninth grade. It was so 1969. Scott Stuart and I decided to start a rumor that we were going to commit double suicide at the site of the dump out by the Smelterville airport.

It wasn't that fun figuring out how to do the deed. We figured some kind of rubber hose connected to the tailpipe of a running car leading into the car itself would suffice.

The fun part was planning our funeral. We went to all of our friends and asked them to be pallbearers. We made plans for where the funeral would be and we began to stop people in the hall to tell them to plan to come, that it would be a great show.

(Are you thinking what I'm thinking right now? If Scott and I had been ninth graders in 2009, we would have been pulled out of school and marched into a room in front of a battalion of counselors and doctors and pharmacists and placed in a juvenile mental detention center and put on a regimen of drugs to pull us out of our melancholy. Luckily, bullshit was bullshit in 1969 and we were able to make these bullshit plans and no one was the worse for wear.)

We were being dopes.

Our most ambitious plan for our funeral was the music. We committed ourselves to having our favorite song played by our favorite recording artist.

Scott planned on inviting Mason Williams to perform "Classical Gas".

My plan was to invite The Association to sing "Cherish". (You can read the lyrics to "Cherish", here.)

I was obsessed with the song, "Cherish". I was also obsessed with Debbie Wakefield. I had taken the words of the song, "Cherish" and built a whole love life around them and projected it all on Debbie Wakefield.

When Debbie and I quit going to dances together and talking on the telephone, that was when Scott and I made our bullshit suicide pact.

That was when I wrote out the words to "Cherish" so I could memorize them and when I heard that Debbie was going to a dance with Mike Farley, I waited until the house was empty and I sobbed and shouted while tears burned my cheeks:

Oh I could say I need you but then you'd realize
That I want you just like a thousand other guys
Who'd say they loved you With all the rest of their lies
When all they wanted was to touch your face, your hands
And gaze into your eyes

But my love was sincere. And silent. I was not going to have Debbie Wakefield think I was like a thousand other guys. I was pure. My love was pure. I was a dope.

I was such a dope, that I took the next verse a little too much to heart:

Perish is the word that more than applies
To the hope in my heart each time I realize
That I am not gonna be the one to share your dreams
That I am not gonna be the one to share your schemes
That I am not gonna be the one to share what
Seems to be the life that you could
Cherish as much as I do yours

Thus, I was ready to perish and have The Association sing "Cherish" after I'd offed myself with Scott.

I suppose I've cheated this assignment a little. We were to write about a song that helped us understand the emotion of love.

"Cherish" didn't help me understand it. "Cherish" deluded me, filled my head with unrealistic, exaggerated ideas of love that could never come true, but that have had a grip on me for the last forty years.

It's amazing to me that the fifteen year old in me remains so alive and that the feelings I had about "love" and romance are still so close to my skin. Intellectually, I know that "Cherish" is a pretend song, that it expresses a totally bogus vision of love.

Nonetheless, it got inside me forty years ago and as I look back over the years and look at what a dope I've been and am when it comes to love, the work of art that most shaped my misunderstandings was "Cherish".

It's humiliating.

My sisters, by the way, wrote much more sensible pieces. InlandEmpireGirl's is here and here is Silver Valley Girl's.