Best. Love. Song. Ever.

Athol Kay is a brilliant writer. I’m reading his book right now (no, not right this moment, I’m writing a blog entry). As an aside he made mention of a song by the equally brilliant Tim Minchin. So naturally I googled it, and damn if it isn’t the Best. Love. Song. Ever.

If I didn’t have you to hold me tight
If I didn’t have you to lie with at night
If I didn’t have you to share my sights
And to kiss me and dry my tears when I cry

Well I really think that I would…
Have somebody else

If I didn’t have you, someone else would do

Your love is one-in-a-million
You couldn’t buy it at any price
But of the nine-point-nine-nine-nine-hundred-thousand other possible loves
Statistically, some of them would be equally nice
Or maybe not as nice but, say, smarter than you
Or dumber, but better at sport… or… tracing…?

I’m just saying
I really think that I would
Probably
Have somebody else, yeah

If I didn’t have you, someone else would do

And look, I’m not undervaluing what we’ve got when I say
That given the role chaos inevitably plays in the inherently flawed notion of “fate”
It’s obstruse to deduce that I’ve found my soul mate at the age of seventeen
It’s just mathematically unlikely that at a university in Perth
I happened to stumble on the one girl on Earth specifically designed for me

And if I may conjecture a further objection, love is nothing to do with destined perfection
The connection is strengthened, the affection simply grows over time
Like a flower
Or a mushroom
Or a guinea pig
Or a vine
Or a sponge
Or bigotry…
Or a banana…

And love is made more powerful by the ongoing drama of shared experience
And the synergy of a kind of symbiotic empathy or… something…

So I trust it goes without saying
That I would feel really very sad
If tomorrow you were to fall off something high
Or catch something bad
But I’m just saying
I don’t think you’re special
I mean, I think you’re special
But you fall within a bell curve

I mean, I’m just saying I
Really think that I would
Probably
Have somebody else

I mean I reckon it’s pretty likely that if, for example,
My first girlfriend Jackie hadn’t dumped me
After I kissed Winston’s ex-girlfriend Neah at Steph’s party back in 1993
And our variables would probably have been altered by the absence of that event
To have meant the advent of a tangential narrative in which we don’t meet
Which is to say there exists a theoretical hypothetical parallel life
Where what is is not as it is, and I am not your husband and you are not my wife

And I am a stuntman living in LA
Married to a small, blonde Portuguese skier
Who when she’s not training
Does abstract painting
Practices yoga
And brews her own beer
And really likes making home movies
And suffers neck down alopecia

But with all my heart and all my mind, I know one thing is true
I have just one life and just one love and, my love, that love is you
And if it wasn’t for you, baby …

I
Really think that I would
Probably
Have somebody else

If I didn’t have you
If I didn’t have you someone else would surely do