Saturday, October 29, 2005

On the Nature of Love

How do you know when you have it?

What are the signs and symptoms?

Is it acute or chronic?

Is it when you feel like the interstices between your cells have filled with helium and your feet no longer touch the ground?

Is it when you wake in the hours just before the dawn and watch your lover sleep, lips slightly parted, looking like an angel?

Is it when your heart swells so that it is hard to breath when your love walks through the door, even if you have only been apart for two hours?

Is it when you sit at the dining room table after dinner and discuss what to do and you decide to stay home and play?

Is it when your friends start referring to you both in the singular, as if you had melded?

Is it when you watch your lover dress and realize that you are both old, but your mind's eye still sees the young, lithe body that once was?

Is it when you lie together in bed as spoons, skin touching skin along your entire length, and you feel the fullness of being, and long for nothing?

Is it when you watch your lover being consumed by the hot breath of the dragon, skin turning slightly yellow with an undertone of green, stretched tightly over the bones so that the surface looks shiney and transparent; you can do nothing; you wish it was you instead?

Is it when you wake one morning and realize twenty years have passed since you first felt these things, and you remember them as if it were yesterday?

Is it when you see your mortality in your lover's eyes and feel as though you have been through this before, and will again?

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Dumb and Dumber

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder where the responsibility of the electorate has gone?

There appears to be no shortage of outrage out there (strident on the right, disorganized on the left) over supreme court nominations, disaster response, war in Iraq, environmental stewardship, balloning deficits, and ethical lapses at the highest levels of government. How is it that we have come to this? Who is to blame?

Well, certainly, blame can be rightly put square on the shoulders of the current administration and there are no shortage of voices out there calling for just that. What is missing is the sense of outrage at ourselves. I mean, we put this sorry group of bunglers right where they can do the most damage. I don't hear anyone chastising us - the electorate - for what we have done.

Why is that? And how did it come to be in the first place?

One might say that the electorate was not entirely to blame for the first corronation of King George. The honor of that coup goes straight to the supreme court. That said, the second election is harder to wiggle out from under. Slightly more than half of the people voting in the last presidential election voted for George Bush, and that is after experiencing him for four years.

How is it that half of the participating electorate voted for a man who can barely get more than four words out of his mouth before he has to stop and wait for the next synapse to fire? How is it that the electorate bought dubya's contention that Sadam Hussein was responsible for 9/11? How is it that the few who vote in this country could believe that the proper and responsible fiscal policy should be to reduce revenue through massive tax cuts to the weathiest one percent while at the same time increasing spending by going to war against a third world tin pot on the other side of the globe (and creating the greatest terrorist training tool conceivable in the process)?

How can this be?

Want to know my theory? It's the lead in our bodies. Yup. You see, back in 1923, when the auto was just starting to make its big splash, a fella named Midgley invented something called tetra-ethyl and saw that it reduced knocking in car engines. So far, so good. Problem is tetra-ethyl is basically lead and it started going into every tank of gasoline, and then promptly out the tail pipe and up our noses. This was the case for the next sixty years or so and by 1986 when it was finally banned in the US, there were shocking amounts of lead in the environment, and also in us. In fact, those of us alive today (those born after 1923 and before 1986) have 625 times more lead in our blood than our ancestors had 100 years ago (this from Bill Bryson and his work "A Short History of Nearly Everything").

Now, as you all know, lead is a neurotoxin. It leads to physical and mental breakdowns, up to and including the staggering jags, halucinations, and death. My belief is that enough of us are mentally unhinged and dumbed down due to lead poisening that we have elected an incompetant and corrupt administration (amoung other things).

Just look at our level of entertainment if you doubt the premise. "Reality TV" (or just about any TV for that matter), modern sports, congress. I have no proof of this of course. I do wonder at the decisions being made all around me. We seem to be incapable of looking honestly at ourselves and our environment and putting two and two together. We are in massive denial (or perhaps a group hallucination).

Whatever the case, I don't get it, but that's just me.