"The Gene That Controls Having Crushes Can't Do Math."

Truer words ain’t been spoke. Found this nugget of wisdom in a comment left by Leta on a blog she only recently pointed out, where the author is eloquent, cynical, and very worth reading. He hung up his keyboard, so naturally there is now only a finite amount of reading to do at his site. Wish I’d known about him while he was still writing… Dang.

In any case: That long paragraph is how we get to the title of this piece. That gene. Controlling crushes, or any other sort of initial romantic attachment.

Would that I could have it removed. That blasted gene has gotten me into trouble on more than one occasion, and appears to be in excellent health, the little bastard.

You can picture it as a cherub with a crossbow that got into the wine; buzzing around my head like those biplanes attacking King Kong atop the Empire State Building. The Monkey Just Wants To Be Left Alone, and they keep on strafing. Jerks.

I don’t regret my past relationships. Oh, I occasionally wish I had done things slightly (or not so slightly differently), but I could still walk away from them knowing firmly that a) Regret isn’t worth the sigh it’s printed on, and b) It’s not the worst mistake in the world if you learn something from it. In every case, with every woman, things were genuinely very good before I went and lost my head. Which I didn't always, just... most of the time.

But that pesky gene… He deserves some downtime. An extended vacation, perhaps. Now.

Anyone familiar with The Incredible Hulk (the show, not the comic) will know what can happen when someone deliberately tries to fiddle with their own DNA in order to nip or tuck their gene sequence. Feces hits the oscillating unit with such tremendous force they’ll name military procedures after it:

Operation: ShitStorm. “We go in, we drop about 200,000 clones of this guy (they point to a picture of me) and convince them to ask the locals on dates. The city will be completely doomed inside 8 months, tops. And he’ll even pay for the flowers!”

General Fiction then receives a commendation for the first gun-quiet hostile takeover in military history. Later on, after reviewing their notes, however, the boards that control such things strip his medals and stick him in the Hague for a trial on gross and inappropriate war crimes.

That’s as far as I’m going to take the tangent on that one. I’m getting better at knowing when to call it quits, in that regard.

Hooray for learning something.