'I'm going to getcha...'

'One way or another, I'm going to getcha, getcha, getcha'--the key line from the Blondie cover that blasted down in the locker room of the gym across the street from my office as I put on my running gear. A compelling beat. An assertive male voice. A love threat, maybe a betrayed love threat, anyway just the thing to launch me as I sprint away from the gym entrance.

That kind of popular and propulsive love or hookup song is the staple of the gym, often with accompanying MTV performers strutting or swinging on the screen all the aerobic workout machines are. Some songs are invitations to some other to make this night special; some claim the other is one waited for for a lifetime.  One: a boy kissing a girlfirend and watched tearfully by the singer. How left out and overlooked you make me feel!

These songs are all 2nd person encounters, sometimes a dialogue, usually a monologue, but directed at someone who should notice, should care, should comply, or will passionately participate. It's you, always and only you, at this high point in our lives when go for broke could take us over the top into ecstasy.

The song mix at the gym is vintage (as are a good number of the bodies down there) but I am struck by the fact that the most prominent public 2nd person expressions in our culture are in songs about love--one way or another. And usually to a driving beat: now, now, NOW!

These songs represent one pole on a spectrum of 2nd person conversations, urgent, vulnerable, intense and almost palpably vivid. The implicit driver is, of course, sexual desire and why not: it's a powerful energy capable of reorientating the world to enhance the object of its focus, You. In the hands of a poet like Dante, such a reconfiguration produced an epic of lasting significance.

The other encounter pole may be cool, cordial, alert, respectful, polite  (in a sincere way), perhaps the way we deal with people at the bank. We share each other's space but don't constitute each other's space. When we're tired of detachment and impartiality, the promise 'One week, maybe next week, I'm going to meetya...,' provides the strong light that throws the shadows that lend texture and vector the world, as I think does the ardor with which God-in-love sings to the beloved Other.

Song follows song, the premise of passion gets lost in repetition. The devolvement of face-to-face anguished pleading to absent-minded head-nodding that to helps pass the time doesn't invalid the power of this kind of encounter. Certainly not for me.