Powerful emotions come and go, so it’s worth noting if one stays

By David McElroy · December 17, 2018

Some feelings are here today and gone tomorrow. For someone who feels as much as I do — and who can easily have great waves of emotion wash over me without warning — one of the most important lessons of life is not to get too attached to any fleeting emotion.

I can fall in love with a new idea and then get cold on it a few days later. I can hate something I’ve made and then decide two weeks later that it was actually quite good. I’ve learned not to get upset as those feelings come and go.

The only thing my mind seems to take too seriously to allow feelings to come and go is romantic love. I’ve certainly had a couple of mild infatuations which I tried to talk myself into being love, but I always really know the difference. The real proof is when my stubborn heart refuses to let go of love which isn’t convenient.

Let me tell you about a dream I had awhile back.

Wherever I was in the dream, it didn’t seem like a real place. It was more like a vast blackness with no end in any direction, and it was as though I was floating in this space. I was very aware of a painful tugging on my chest. I could feel that it was coming from what looked like a silver thread or cord that was physically attached to me near the center of my chest.

Something was pulling hard on the other end of this cord. Every pull yanked at me and seriously damaged me, so I was scared and in a lot of pain. I didn’t know what it was, but I just wanted to break the cord so it would quit hurting. It seemed quite small, so it seemed reasonable that I could just snap it easily, as you might a piece of sewing thread. But when I tried to break it, I found that it was made of something so strong that it didn’t even stretch or bend or show any effect from my efforts.

A voice from behind me said, “You can’t break that thread. It’s an unbreakable philotic cord. You will have to live with that connection in place.”

Since I know that a “philotic connection” is a fictional concept — from the science fiction novels of Orson Scott Card — I know that it had to be a metaphor, but in the dream it seemed very real. I wanted to turn and look at the place where the voice was coming from, but I knew that I wasn’t allowed to turn, because I would see God’s face if I did. I suddenly understood what the cord was.

It tied me to a woman. The voice which I identified as God was firm but kind and loving. He knew it hurt, but it wasn’t going to go away.

That sounds miserable. (It is miserable.) But I have to celebrate it anyway, as strange as that sounds.

Since I know feelings can come and go, it’s comforting that my heart is committed to some few things whether they’re convenient or not. Why do I celebrate this? Because it’s my way of knowing what’s real and what’s just passing fancy.

I don’t like hurting. I don’t like longing for love I can’t have. I don’t enjoy obsessing about what might have been. But at least I can be certain this love is real — and that’s something no one can take away from me.

I’ve never gotten over real love easily when I could no longer have it. The only thing that’s ever allowed me to get over love is finding a new love which is even greater. That’s hard to imagine now, but I have to believe there is someone out there who I can love even more — who can finally break this bond which I haven’t been able to kill on my own.

For tonight, though, I quietly celebrate something which I know is real and true and genuine. Romantic love in this world is often based on sexual attraction or social prestige or mere habit. None of those will last. None of those mean anything in the long run.

I know I have something — for now, at least — that’s as real as love can get. It might be painful. It might be inconvenient. It might leave me lonely. But it’s the kind of genuine love and connection with another heart which poets and painters and sculptors and movie characters all long for.

I can say I’ve genuinely loved with my whole heart — and I don’t think many people have experienced that. So I celebrate a warm and open and imperfect heart that’s full of love for an imperfect woman, even if it hurts for now.

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It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

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