Perhaps I’ve been desensitized by over-sexed media inputs, or maybe I’m just a jaded pervert, but I too often overlook the awesome power of a good kiss.
Humans are the only species that kiss, and scientists have no idea why. It’s like licking a petri dish, so biologically it doesn’t make sense.
When we kiss, our bodies are flushed with chemicals and good vibes. Lips are almost as sensitive as the genitals or fingertips. A kiss can make us fall in love, fall in lust, or fall somewhere in between.
Nobody is above the power of a good kiss, not even major badasses like the libidinous American poet Charles Bukowski who has written odes to big asses and “beer shits.” He wrote that kissing is more intimate than sex. He produced erotic, romantic confection like, “I will remember the kiss our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what is left of me . . .”
The kiss is a universal symbol of love. Art and pop culture blast us with eroticism and raunch, for which we are insatiable. But nothing, NOTHING, beats an iconic kiss.
Case in point: my favourite Brat Pack flick of all time, Pretty in Pink. Let haters hate; this movie is a classic. The scene where Andie and Blane kiss for the first time sets of butterflies and lights my loins ablaze.
It represents everything great about locking lips. There’s the anxiety and anticipation in the lead up. The cheeky lip bite and grin. The moment of connection and subsequent cluster bomb of heat and shivers and euphoria shooting through the body, rendering you breathless. It’s nothing less than magic.
To this day, Andie and Blane’s first kiss makes me squeal like a lovesick teenybopper.
I’ll be the first to admit, many of my makeout sessions are drunken farce. I’m referring to you, you 30-year-old Aussie and all my partners in half-assed bi-curiosity. Not every embrace is an up-side-down Spiderman kiss (which I have accomplished), but those moments make up for every cringe-worthy instance of face-suckage.
The beauty of a kiss is easy to overlook. It’s so simple an act, usually one’s first exploit as a sexual being. But don’t let yourself forget for long.
I was reminded of this simple magic while trapped in a funk of scholarly solitude. Normally, while writing essays I daydream about shampooing Damian Marley’s dreads in some ambrosial pond. But randomly, I thought of a moment from a few months past that I’d all but forgotten.
I was at a friend’s house party in Centretown, and throughout the night I talked to *Rob, the guest of honour, who I’d just met. Everyone got drunker, the floor got stickier, and the music was blasting like any proper bacchanal.
I can’t remember exactly which song was playing; it may have been by Lil Wayne, or Lil Jon. Maybe Tyga? Rob twirled me, like we were about to burst into the foxtrot, and then kissed me on the cheek.
That has never happened in my life. The point of impact tingled. It was like his lips had been coated in Burt’s Bees lip balm and crack.
He later gave a dude a very sloppy lap dance, thus signaling the end of my romantic pursuits for the night. But that’s fine. It is still the cutest moment of 2012.
All it took was the memory of a lingering smooch on the cheek to get me out of an essay funk and here I am, writing an ode to kissing. So don’t poo-poo the romantics. They have something right . . . locking lips is a beautiful thing.
