Radio 83, side A, track 8: “The Things We Do For Love” by 10cc

Oh, 10cc, I have vivid memories of hearing this song as a little kid.  Like, I’m guessing I was maybe 5 years old or something and I remember that I loved it.  It was probably one of my favorites at that tender age.  Did I hear it on the radio?  On a jukebox at Dar’s Pizza?  I really don’t know, 10cc, but I’m glad you’re back in my life.

As a teenager, I would have been all about this song, 10cc.  There was nothing I loved better than thinking about walking through the rain and the snow for my true love.  Any kind of suffering, especially if it was emotional, that’s what proved one’s love.

Now that I’m hitting my mid-life mark, all of that angst is just silly, 10cc.  Writing poems and getting drunk and professing your love is great and all, but I’ve discovered that expressing real, actual love is way more mundane.  It’s sleeping on the couch at night so you can help your elderly dog make it outside more quickly when his legs and his bowels just aren’t working anymore.  It’s doing all the grocery shopping because your wife hates the grocery store.  It’s going to Popeye’s, which has the absolute worst customer service in the history of the world, and picking up a three-wing combo for your beloved when she’s sick because sometimes fried chicken is the cure, and it has to be from Popeye’s because even though they really are the absolute worst, they still make the best damn fried chicken.  It’s sending a furiously typed Facebook message to your wife’s dick of a stepfather because he made her cry one too many times.

So yeah, none of that is going to ever get made into a movie or even a poorly written Nicholas Sparks novel.  But at least there are songs like this I can listen to while I’m waiting in line for 45 minutes for a fried chicken dinner that’s going to end up being wrong anyway.  Seriously, fuck Popeye’s.

lyrics to “The Things We Do For Love”