When I was young my mother told me never to touch the light of the candle, no matter how playfully it danced on the wick and dared me to grab it. All it took was a boy’s night with dad, and many failed attempts to grasp that illusive vanilla-scented Yankee Doodle flame, for him to realize that I was never going to quit my mission to blister my toddler hands. As I reached out for the burn my father acknowledged the act and, after presumably (hopefully) weighing the foreseeable options, put no stop to it, figuring that if I wasn’t going to learn my lesson by listening to orders then I’d just have to learn it the hard way. And choose to learn the hard way I did. But learn my lesson, I did not. And thus began my love affair with an unending desire for things that the whole world warned would hurt me in the end.

Upon their introduction into my prepubescent life, drugs and alcohol, alcohol and drugs, made more sense to me than learning about the capitals of countries I’d never heard of and would surely never see with my own eyes. I’d hardly ever left Jersey and I’m supposed to feign interest in a country named after Thanksgiving dinner? These chemicals and concoctions and cocktails had everything going for them in terms of appealing to a defiant impressionable kid. They were illegal, made you feel good, had the danger of making you feel bad, and if you did them boastfully enough people would even think you were cooler than you were-an invaluable trait for a thirteen year old with more sense of direction than he knew what to do with.

As I got older, and the drinks got stiffer and the drugs got heavier, I found that a lot of my behavior stemmed from how I felt I was being perceived by others. I was ten times more likely to drink in excess if there were people around to egg me on. Doing drugs alone wasn’t something that ever even occurred to me. There was just about nothing I wouldn’t have done under the pressure of my peers. A byproduct of this mindset that has yet to evade my thought process is that there isn’t anything I won’t do if a pretty girl tells me to do it.

This is where the case of love dips its toes into the deep end. Perhaps the most intense of the aforementioned disorientation-inducers, love would prove to be the defining chase in my formative years. When it was just about drinks and drugs I found any which way to weasel my way into whichever circle was doing the experimenting. And when I got a taste for the attraction of the opposite gender it was no different. Where I once had money and things with which to trade for a dime bag, I now had words with which to flirt, presents with which to persuade, and pseudo-romantic gestures that girls would realize five years later were stolen from John Hughes movies.

It was hardly a healthy start into my career of replacing one vice with another but I pursued the path nonetheless, disregarding all of the warning signs, potholes, garbage fires, and sucker punches along the way. Part of it has to be human nature. Because if it isn’t then the reality is that I am as supremely and irreversibly damaged as they say. Everybody wants what they can’t have, right? It’s natural. Natural; like cancer and earthquakes.

I’ll walk into a party, minding my business, not expecting anything profound to happen. I’m especially not anticipating falling for anyone or having anyone fall for me. But somehow, time and time again without fail, I’ll weed out the one person in that sticky, humid, smoke filled room who is charming enough in either looks or personality, and as messed up as me in some way or another, and hit it off with them. I don’t have the data on hand to prove this but I’m convinced that, in the way that some peoples’ pheromones intoxicate the opposite sex, the chemicals I produce have an effect similar to boxed wine, in that it convinces girls that the bad decision they’re thinking about making is a good one, maybe even one worth repeating daily for six months to two years.

If you take a healthy, sweet, well-intentioned gal and add me to the mix and wait a couple months, what you’ll find at the end of that unholy rainbow is far from a pot of gold. It will look more like a woman who knows only scorn, remedies for the throat after a nights worth of screaming, and the unfortunate knowledge of exactly how many jokes about her mom she can take until her rules on physical violence go out the window (along with any of my belongings that happen to be within arm’s reach). And I don’t blame them, these girls; these…what’s a nicer word for victims? I’m hyper aware of how I can be. And in accordance with my behavior I’m going to continue to try to get someone or something else to shoulder some of the blame, because the weight of a decade’s worth of guilt is destroying my knees and, as far as I know, Obamacare doesn’t cover broken hearts.

I’m still that child playing with fire; except the only difference now is that I anticipate and even enjoy the burn. The scars are like trophies in some weird Freudian way that I’m sure I won’t understand until it hits me in a dream in my forties, when I’m already well on my way to raising sociopaths of my own. For whatever reason, I’m addicted to that cat and mouse game. And the crazy part is, when I’m single Me and there’s no one around to torture or love, I play the role of both Tom and Jerry, driving myself insane with arguments that I have against myself in my own head, all of which I have yet to win.

And somehow, by some miracle or omen, girls that are always far out of my league (not that the bar is set high in regard to my worth as a significant other) fall for me for some reason or another. I haven’t pinpointed whether it’s because they think they can fix me or if they’re as masochistic as I am or if there’s genuinely some redeemable quality buried under years of cowboy killer smoke and well whiskey that they, in all their feminine wisdom and misfortune, uncover from the rubble. Whatever it is, it is somehow both the bane of my existence and my one true reason for living. I don’t know if it’s benign, but I know that it’s contagious and that life is terminal anyway. So as always, I plan on riding the high until I die or burn up. Because if I or someone else doesn’t fix me, then that’s about the best option I’ve got.