Episode 77: Someone Who Will Love You (oR that You can Love) In All your Damaged Glory

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Fun fact. It’s hard to pick the topics for these episodes some times. When the field is so open and you can really go with anything, kind of like how I structured this podcast, you--or in this case I--can have trouble narrowing in on the specific thing I want to talk about, which leads to hours of a needless anguish-filled search for a topic I want to work with in a sea of potential topics. 

And it’s getting harder and harder to come up with one because, well, I’ve burned through all the topics that made me want to launch this show in the first place. So then there’s the search through my records trying to figure out not only if I have covered a topic, which would be straightforward but also if I intended that topic for a certain season or event. Because search engine optimization and all that.

But the other day, I tried to pitch one of my new favorite books to a coworker. Unsuccessfully because of some factors. But those are the best factors to have working against you. Because it’s not that she didn’t want to read the book. It’s that she has seventeen other books she really needs to read for various other commitments, and I’m not a mean person, so if she doesn’t get to it, then I’m not going to hold it against her. As far as disappointments go, this one still has something that vaguely looks like a compliment nestled in, so fair enough. And she knows she can always grab my copy when need be. 

But because I already have all those points lined out, I guess I can make the most of it. One stones, and two half birds that essentially make a fully bird. Or more but we’re probably in half bird intervals. And that’s a weird sentence but one that also seems appropriate. Or appropriate for Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s style: a surrealist yet oddly familiar grapple with what is both familiar but not understood. 

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Hi. It’s M. Welcome to episode 77.

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If the name Raphael Bob-Waksberg is familiar, it’s probably not in the context of this book. Oh sorry, I should probably explicitly say what the title of this book is. It’s Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory. (Pause) Is that a confusing sentence? With a title like that, there’s plenty of potential for comedic misinterpretation. True to Bob-Waksberg’s style. And also, someone who will love you in all your damaged glory is a thing we all want and hope for as a literal concept, so yeah, good title. Wish I could come up with something that brilliant. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that I’m not great on that front. 

It’s a good book, but it remained or likely to remain something like a cult classic, though you could say the same thing about most books. But this book in particular has found an audience that adores it, even if we are a smallish crowd. And unfortunately the pessimist would say that there is something inevitable about that. And this argument has some merit. There were just something or several things that were working against it. I guess disclaimer that it only came out recently, as in June of 2019, so I might be proven wrong. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, collections of short stories don’t really sell well, and yeah, this style of twisting reality might be something you have a taste for but maybe not. There’s really no inbetween.

But what it did have going for it was Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s other career successes, specifically the Netflix original show BoJack Horseman, an adult animation show about an anthropomorphic horse-man who was a big star in the 90s has decided to make a comeback. Well, actually no, that’s not quite right. Really, he’s trying to find some satisfaction or meaning and rewatching his old show over and over again isn’t doing it for him. But of course, once he’s started this quest, his self-destructive tendencies come out in full force. All the while, he’s trying desperately to be a good person or to have goodness in his life because he’s only ever really known it in passing for this. But nothing is ever easy to the fully well-adjusted, which he definitely isn’t, so yeah he’s got that working against him too. 

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BoJack Horseman is also a show I’ve wanted to talk about on this podcast for a while. Or even just talk a couple episodes here and there. It has some truly prolific ones, having broken through many of the tropes of television shows or--in particular--the 90s sitcom type of show BoJack starred in and all the previous television models that influenced both the concept and the human-horse himself. 

There’s a lot to the show and its soon to be completed six seasons. And that’s the problem, despite how badly I want to talk about this show or episodes of it on this podcast, I haven’t because I have no clue where to begin. BoJack Horseman is a show that touches so much of the human experience, particularly those aspects that are most personal. And some of the most powerful episodes feed off of each other. Meaning that full discussions of the show, while worthwhile, will require more of a commitment than I typically require of you who come to listen to this podcast. 

Also, that’s going to be a very long episode. Which is great but also more than I can do right now.

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And there I go again, I guess. I’m getting started with no destination in mind because that’s what a good story like BoJack Horseman can do to you. It engages with the facts of your non-linear reality and breaks your dependence on the simple cause and effect that we otherwise rely on. To what end, you might not understand. You just know it feels right. Even if it doesn’t always manifest properly. 

Maybe it’s not a surprise because this comes from the same creative mind, but saying it just to say it: Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, the book, is a collection of short stories built around the same phenomenon. There’s a common suspension of tropes and widely ideas that Bob-Waksberg sets aside out of a matter of convenience. A lot of ground gets covered in these short stories. And they are short, some very, but regardless they are still able to strike at that same deeply personal cord that so many moments in BoJack Horseman do.

And hey, maybe these stories did have some sort of advantage after all. For one, without the need for any visuals, Bob-Waksberg could describe and make whatever he wanted. He did not need to worry about an animator’s ability to properly conceptualize what something like a promise egg is or how they are going to capture the passage of time or physical changes of a person in a short span of time when a lot of the other mechanics of the human body are irelevant. He can just say everything is different or like this, that, or the other thing. And you as the reader who is likely familiar with his other work and have--therefore--developed a sense of trust in him that maybe other new writers wouldn’t be able to expect, you are happy to take him at his word and go along this journey with him.

I mean, that’s just his style. This entire book is true to his creative perspective and flair. It’s him without any unnecessary limitations. But beyond that, it’s a book about love. And we are beings that constantly seek out love, making it a universal theme or topic. You can fairly say then that there’s something for everyone, even if it’s not exactly a variety or buffet style of book. Because this quest, this mission or pursuit, is something we are all on regardless of the details.

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Unless we have it already it, you could be saying. True, but I wouldn’t know how that works. I’ve never really been at the point where I felt comfortable with the amount of love I have or people connected to me through love in my life. It always feels like I’m seeking out something more. And it’s probably needlessly foolish to think the right partner or the right partner in the right dynamic might be able to fix that or minimize the yearning a bit. But I don’t know. I do know it is not necessarily the right topic or subtopic for this podcast. 

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Then again, in a past episode, I told you about V, whom I felt to be a great love in my soul but was already in a committed relationship with a guy who I didn’t think was all that great but my opinion didn’t technically matter. He was getting great results on the “make partner happy front,” so yeah, he had that going for him. 

Did I leave you hanging on that front? Honestly, I never meant to return to that uneventful story no matter what, but it doesn’t even feel like an uneventful story anymore. It’s something else entirely. Something less. Because V and I don’t even talk anymore. And you would think that hurts more than it actually does.

Because I was in love. Because that smile lit up my world. And I swore there was no other love other than that love. It filled me with a sense of joy in my cold heart that I had thought impossible, that I assumed could never be mine. Even in hindsight, I was in love with V, more than I had any right to be considering V was in a super committed relationship. But regardless, I was in love. 

Now apparently, I’m not. Now, I’m in love with someone else, facing that same painful, longing for an ounce of affection or a sign my that feelings are returned. It’s the same story, but some details are swapped out. There’s a certain repetitiveness to my quests for love that I always assumed should not be there. That the highs and lows are way too high and way too low. That I’m desperate or not desperate enough. Or desperate in the wrong ways. And those ways have their reasons, but that’s not a conversation for the internet.

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And maybe that’s what love was supposed to be. There has to be a nothing for you to fully realize what is there or what it is like to have something. Our perceptions are relative, after all. However, that’s a pretty intense philosophical discussion that I can’t handle right now.

So let’s avoid it. What I can say--and maybe what I have said before--is that romantic love is not something I’m great at. It’s something I’ve been dreaming about and romanticized for as long as I can remember. But every romantic connection in my life has been a crash and burn. Best case scenario, I’m the only one hurt in that crash because if I love someone I would never let that person suffer, particularly not for my sake. But not always. And hey, at least it hasn’t been boring. I keep finding new ways to get my heartbroken, and there are so many out there to discover. As many as the different people out there that you could fall in love with.

That’s not optimistic. I get it, but I never said it was. Which when compared to the last episode might be… Hypocritical, unexpected, odd.

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It’s certainly jarring. But hear me out. I think we are inclined or taught to be optimistic over realistic about love as a way to compensate for everything else that goes wrong in our lives. Love is meant to be a break from the proverbial scream I mentioned in the last episode. In my lover’s arms, I find my refuge, and so on and so forth. There’s a thousand ways to say that. And you’ve probably heard a dozen or two that I haven’t.

But that’s just it. In all other things, we are meant or told to be dry and serious. But love is the one exception. Love is the only outlet we have to be blithe and foolhardy. And so we better do it all right. We better. This is our only outlet, so you know, stakes are high. Hence why we need to be nothing but optimistic and certainly not realistic about love.

There’s a way to be both, but as Bob-Waksberg shows over and over again, we never really strike that balance properly. Even when you consider love as a phenomenon in a bubble, we still have our difficulties and our moments. We mess up. But we try again. Then maybe but likely we mess up again. And then we try again. And so on and so forth until we can’t do it anymore.

That’s fairly simple on some fronts. However, within that pattern are a thousand moments and mini or major heartbreaks. There are moments of hope and joy interspersed around that despair. 

But there’s a story for every one of those moments, and many of them are in this book. In this all encompassing tome, there is a short story about the types of love affairs we have or seemingly almost jump from, not that there isn’t a rhythm to this supposed madness or reasons for each of these breaks and coming together. But regardless of the reasoning, it’s still going to create ghosts in the city we live in. But we’re trying to do the best we can, you know? Sometimes you can’t talk to the person you’re in love with. Sometimes you talk too much. Sometimes you find them in all the wrong places. We’re just trying to do the best that we can, trying to make a move, lease everything faded away.

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Well, everything will fade away. The most heart-wrenching line of the entire book and its many lines is the simple reminder that this state we find ourselves in is temporary and unrepeatable. That our actions--intentional or not, thrust upon us or not--are ones we have to live with. But between you and me, that might be obvious right? Especially if you watch BoJack Horseman on Netflix, but that thesis has seeped its way into this book too. 

But even beyond that, it’s a sort of common sense statement. We have to live in the corner of reality that we carved out for ourselves regardless of the paint color we have chosen. But it is this simple fact that we always don’t want to live with, right? There are things that we run from because we can’t bear to handle it or we inherited an understanding of romance that deliberately excluded this aspect of love. Truths don’t just hurt sometimes. They are big, scary monsters lurking in the shadows that could outright kills us. Or it’s more complicated, like in this case. Love is something we should want, it is something worth pursuing, it could be done right, and doing so is a virtue or a good life. The flip side of this coin is something that could be ignored. Until you lived it.

We’ve all had our set of dysfunctional relationships. For me, there’s the partner in graduate school who was using me to network with a professor from my undergraduate days. Thenseries of guys in college who entered the priesthood, I wish I was kidding. And then there’s that one person I was absolutely love and can’t have. Yet again. Same story different details. And maybe it will go the same path. Maybe it will not. But I can’t know that from here. In many ways, I’m just waiting in the company of my fear and insecurities.

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But I can distract myself with these and other books. Distract, connect, engage, love. We can all do these things when we consume stories. But the stories in this book are extra digestible. They have this sweet coating that makes them easier to swallow even when you hit the bitter parts. 

But there’s more to them than that. Namely, that this is a great execution of the concept. While some stories are obviously going to be stronger than others.  They are clear connection in a thematic sense. They have their message and intention. They work together but still feel distinct. Nondescript characters can--in many ways--be thought of as the same core set of characters. that evolve and change with the seasons. In fact, as a collection of short stories, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory represents the collection of vignettes that make up our life. In it are pieces that can be thought of as separate and distinct entities but in actuality, still make up a larger whole: a journey that does not adhere to standard narrative techniques but still reveals aspects of us and the human condition.

It does get complicated, yes, but it should. Because love is the sort of thing, and maybe the only thing, that we all want and are all desperately pursuing that exists entirely out of the realm of our control. Too many variables. Too little understanding. And ot is what it is. A nonlinear reality that we found ourselves stuck in. Making the most of it. Finding what little scraps of joy we can while obsessing over that which escapes us. 

As a wise primate says, though, “It gets easier every day, but you have to do it every day.”

P.S. That’s from BoJack Horseman because I cannot keep my excitement in check.

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