"Crazy" by Willie Nelson

Singalong 014: Retail dating

“I’m Crazy / Crazy for feeling so lonely”

I’ve got nothing new to say about this song. By now, the Willie canon is like the Interstate Highway System: it’s hard to imagine the time before it existed, and there’s no need to describe it unless you’re talking to someone who has never seen a road, or been on one. It takes us places, and where it took us specifically is less important than the fact that we went somewhere.

And who of us hasn’t gone crazy?

For me, learning how to love has been a Thomas Edison-like journey of finding ten thousand ways not to love. (I’m not saying that that’s my body count or anything. Head over to Subskank if you’re looking for that kind of content), just that there is nothing like a mistake to show you exactly how not to do something.

Or in my case, a long era of mistakes.

The math speaks for itself: I’m 51, and this year I’ll mark ten years with my beloved. It’s the only time I’ve made it beyond three years with anyone, so let’s say that’s 40 years in the desert. After years 1-20 (infancy, adolescence, the requisite slaughtering of Innocence and a few other shattered illusions thrown in for flavor) I frittered away years 21-40 honestly searching for the big L. Two grown ass decades.

Many L’s, large and small, were taken along the way.

Unrequited pining? Check. Unrewarded pursuit? Check. Desperate stumbles and frenzied fumbles? Check. Clinging to the wrong one for too long? Hello. Quantity over quality? Hooo-boy. Promising myself that this is the the last time I will ever make that mistake? The line forms to the right.

I’ll spare you my war stories, that’s what music is for.

“I knew that you'd love me as long as you wanted / And then someday you'd leave me for somebody new”

Can we talk about a thing I like to call “retail dating”? You know: looking for that special someone, shopping around for someone who’s the right “fit”, someone who has all the right things in all the right places, in all the right amounts, someone who makes you laugh, who takes care of business, who “knows their place” etc…

Off-the-rack matchfinding?

Retail dating.

Here’s an area where market-thought can (and does) truly ruin things: a bro-fluencer might self-helpily weave up an alluring binary between retail and wholesale dating. He might tell you that you’re doing it wrong, but that you can get “smart about it” and take a quantified approach.

Go there if you want, thoughtplay has its place: “people reproduce, therefore they *produce* other people, therefore people are, in fact, products and are therefore subject to market dynamics…” but I’m happy to leave that frittery to the hairy young Krugmans and Cowens of the dating complex. There’s a zone of zealously zigzagging Zizek zygotes out there for your scrolling pleasure.

Not here though. Dating wholesalers can be found over on Substank. Meanwhile, people are not products.

“Objectification” is a word people use to indicate the self-delusion of treating each other like Objects. We can unconsciously pretend that other people are “things” to be seen, craved, chased, claimed, possessed and acted upon. And who among us hasn’t fallen for it at some point in our comings and goings? Hello, humanity. But it’s de-humanizing, When we do it, we miss out. We deprive each other of our agency and dignity. It’s a demeaning, degrading experience for both the objectifier and the objectify-ee. It’s also exhausting and it leads nowhere.

But look up the actual word: an Object isn’t just a thing. It can be also be a goal.

If someone treats you like a thing, you can (eventually) see through it and move on. And if you treat self-respecting people like things, they’ll eventually reject you. Your life will be boring and sad. But what if someone treats you like their goal? What if someone becomes your goal? Not so simple.

We set goals because something is missing from our lives. We set goals because there is a void within us that we can’t tolerate. The goal is there to make us do things we otherwise would not do, to get us out of somewhere we don’t want to remain.

Goals are good, but the only Person in the world who should be your goal is you.

So when you catch yourself making “somebody special” your goal, or if you find someone making you their goal, fall back. It’s time for a reset, no matter how hard.

Retail dating? Have at it. I’m all for taking some laps around the track. But looking outside of yourself for someone to fill the void inside of yourself will always leave you a little emptier. With the edges a little more brittle.

That’s all I got. I’m not an advice columnist. I’m a musician.

“Worry, why do I let myself worry / Wondering what in the world did I do”

A song can arrive by chance into an empty, desperate moment. Landing from beyond, an emotional courier bringing a listener something they need, before they die from the lack of it. Oftentimes a song is the last thing separating a lonely heart from an early exit, and I’ve been rescued from my own suicidal tendencies by songs enough times by now to devote my life to it.

Does “Crazy” make you feel seen? This song sees just about everybody at one point or another. It’s medicine for you. Here’s me singing it: