Hey soul sister!

Well, I knew it. It turns out that we’re all full of shit, and our preferences are really dictated for the most part by our own unconscious self image and how well whoever you’re dealing with matches up to this image.

Oh, I know what you’re saying. “I’m a big fat black lady and I love tiny asian boys” or “my best friend is Mexican and I’m a quadriplegic jew” and wow…yeah, way to be, folks. That’s the kind of diversity and unity that keeps this crazy blue marble spinning, but that’s not entirely what I’m talking about.

The thing is, and I’m paraphrasing this study to a point that’s gotta be absolutely maddening to anyone who actually did the research or followed it closely, you’ve got traits, mental and physical that may be real and may just be all in your head.

Like you out there! Yeah, you! You think that you’ve got chiseled features, but really you’re doughy and lopsided. You, you think that you’re really magnanimous but really you’re a self serving, self congratulatory will smith type dong choker. You don’t know yourself very well. Neither do I. It’s hard. That’s why, when you’re out somewhere and you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror that you didn’t know was there, it’s so fucking unsettling. “Who the fuck is THAT?” you think to yourself, which makes a lot of sense, since you’re really the only person you know who’s never stood there in a room with you across the way. You’re the only one of your friends who’s never looked at you when you’re not paying attention, when your gut’s out and you’re slack jawed and you’re just sitting there playing with your nipple or picking your nose. You don’t know you, bro.

But that’s not really the point.

The point is, you’ve got traits that you share with other people, despite how aware you may be of them. Some, you’ve got nailed (“I’m bald”) and some you don’t ever think about (“I’ve got asymmetrical nostrils”) but they’re all there, and these traits when you see them in other people, engender a fundamental, base level sense of kinship in you that makes bonds like trust and friendship easier to form.

Now, relax, quadri-jew! That’s not to say this is the ONLY way that you find friends or lovers or whatever, and lots of the traits are things that aren’t really consciously discernable, because, as we said earlier, you don’t know yourself very well.

Know how people say you look like someone and you just can’t see it? Meanwhile, you think you look like Jude Law or Mindy Main, but nobody is telling you that. They’re saying Kevin James and Grace Jones. That’s because you’ve got a warped self image. People tell me that my kid and I are spitting images, but I don’t see it, and that, folks, IS the point.

You have this sense of feature related kinship that comes from the primitive notion that your family is there to protect you and be protected by you, and as such, you feel naturally, by way of genetics, close to them. You understand what I’m saying. I’m not suggesting that the only people that you like are those who look just like you, simply that you’ve definitely got a predisposition to feel comfortable around those people (personal opinions of how you or they look [“I think I’m ugly,” or “that guy is a slob”] notwithstanding).

What’s the ultimate manifestation of this? Have you ever heard about the freakish (and sadly, not totally uncommon) stories of fraternal twins, separated at birth who meet in adulthood, fall in love and get married, sometimes have kids, all the while blissfully unaware that they’re perfect genetic matches of each other? Can you imagine? I mean, can you even fathom the deep bond that two twins that didn’t know they were twins would instantly form? It would be crazy! I mean, you think you’re in love now…you got nothing on the self/fraternal/sexual/emotional family/emotional friend/confidant/person that looks so much like me that my primate instincts are ordering me to feel good around this person cocktail of affection that two unwitting twins would have to possess upon getting to know each other as adults.

Shit, man. It’s hard enough out there. It’s hard to find someone you can stand, let alone really, truly get along with. Add in bonability and you’ve got a tough row to hoe no matter how you look at it in terms of finding a mate.

I’ve got a buddy who says things like “I’m gonna just kind of do my thing until I’m 40 and then find a wife and settle down” as though it’s that easy. You don’t get to pick when you find love, buddy. IF you’re lucky enough to find someone who can stand you that you want to be around too, there’s still so many timing issues and bigger galactic problems of families, locations, careers, prison time, luck, bad luck and all that to deal with that the notion of deciding when you’re gonna meet ‘the one’ for you is so completely naïve that it borders on insulting. No, in fact it’s totally insulting to all the people out there who keep dating dudes who bang their friends at parties or girls who have saggy meat bag cans or whatever.

Now, think about meeting the perfect person, against all odds. You’ve won the lottery. THEN, consider the other lottery that you’ve won, the bad lottery, when you realize that your perfect husband is actually your long lost twin.

That’s suicide stuff, folks. And not funny suicide either. Real, honest-to-pete drive down to the bridge and dive off type stuff.

Anyway, I was just thinking about unwitting incest and what a crazy thing it is to be alive, and I thought I’d share it with you. Tune in Monday for “consensual incest: those creepy folks in Australia and more” if you dare.

Have a nice weekend!