Why does Budu McRae keep haunting me? And why does she keep haunting the guy in the song, who clearly doesn’t have a chance with her? She’s so close, but so distant. She’s around the corner, not on his block. She’s just out of reach.

How else is she around the corner? Is she twisted? Perverted? Or just unbalanced – just crazy that way?

The real question, however, is…who’s crazy? Budu may be crazy that way, but the singer seems to be crazy in a the best definition of the word – doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. He expects to Budu to choose him as her partner, in spite of the fact that Butch Stover, his competition, makes love like Casanova. What chance does he have?

He takes another tack. But he’s not really moving anywhere – understandable, since being told that his rival makes love like Casanova. He tries to give us a cute, non-threatening story about a childlike Budu in an innocent, pastoral setting, but he comes up with sadistic overtones, and the truth that he can’t get away from. The bumble bee is Butch Stover, the stinger is Butch’s penis. Budu has had oral sex with him 5 times, and genital sex three more times. This fellow really is a Casanova. He can’t escape the truth of it: “Five times in the eye! Three times in the knee! Butch Stover! Casanova!”

And if the ability to make incredible love is not enough to rule him out, it develops that our hero also doesn’t have the money like Rockefeller. So if he doesn’t have the big bucks, and he doesn’t have the sexual prowess, what does he have?

Only one thing that we know about. Intellectual gifts, If she chooses him, she won’t be getting a dummy.

And that’s the heart of it. The ineffectual cri de coeur of the intellectual. Against Butch? Rocky?

So, like any ineffectual intellectual, he keeps making his case more and more ineffectually, willing to settle for less and less – “hug me don’t you kiss me, kiss me don’t you bite me, love me don’t you hurt me.” He tries to appeal to her working class instincts – “digging a ditch, so we’ll both get rich,” but like any academic, he doesn’t really know how to do it.

He really is crazy that way.