Hyperbole, thy name is soup

Where do bad folks go when they die?

None of us really know, except apparently the guys from Nirvana, who wrote an awesome song based on that ancient human concern.

But I know where bad writers go, at least before they die.

Camden, New Jersey, USA.

There they write soup labels, through the mist of their tear-glazed eyes.

According to the label on XYZ brand of soup which I imbibed for lunch today, the stuff was delightful, traditional, memorable, generous, chock full, oven-roasted, whimsical, rich, aromatic and savory. None of those labels apply to anything or anyplace I ever saw in New Jersey, except perhaps aromatic, leading me to wonder from whence the writer drew his stock.

It was, the label continued, sure not only to "delight my tastebuds" but to "soothe my soul."

I wonder if the savory herbs included cannabis sativa. Or if the writer himself/herself indulged in a little extract of ergot before gushing out the preceeding thesaurus-worth of adjectives.

My belly is slightly fuller but my soul is hardly soothed. Perhaps I need to assume a yoga position, shed my capitalist inhibitions, man, and commune more sincerely with the all-white chicken pieces.

Soundtrack for the Road

It's Monday. Monday sucks. People who like Mondays have serious pyschological problems and should consult a qualified counselor.

But I did enjoy my drive in. Had some great music on the CD player.

Good road music can be gauged by its effect on your speed. And since I pushed 80 mph the whole way, seriously risking a speeding ticket, it should be obvious that my tunes rocked.

Usually Metallica does that for me. Lars and crew are the penultimate gods of metal. Do not listen to Ride The Lightning while passing through a speed trap.

But today I buzzed with another M: Mozart. As in, the Coronation Mass, at least the Gloria and Credo. I'll have to catch the rest of it on the way home.

The fever pitch, the excitement of the voices rising to a crescendo, reminded me of a long-ago music class revelation -- when my high school teacher showed us with a metronome how some classical pieces had a faster beat than what we kids thought were the rocking hot tunes of the day.

To my first college roommate -- a tragic genius who got tangled up in heroin and vanished, never to be found, a great loss to the world -- I owe my second musical revelation, that a person can -- and should -- live to enjoy both rock and great classical music.

Meditation upon the mosquito

Consider the lowly mosquito.

What empires this wretched insect has helped to topple, what military campaigns has it sapped!

Who wouldn’t wish for its extinction, this vector of annoyance, debilitation and disease?

It joins the list of loathsomes one might hold up to argue against the existence of an All-wise, loving Creator.

But it also seems to me to present a challenge to the doctrines of evolution.

You see, some opponents of evolution will say that a trait, such a wing, could not gradually evolve, because it would serve no purpose until it reached its final stage of development. What good is a wing that doesn’t work for flight?

The counter: a wing-in-progress might not be developed enough to enable flight in the purest sense, but a survival advantage could still be conferred by its use in simple gliding or slowing a fall.

I can agree with that.

But what of the mosquito’s blood-seeking snout?

It appears to be evolved from some ancestral tool used for drinking plant juices, the way the male’s still is.

But how could there be an intermediate stage between sipping plants and sipping animal blood? And if there wasn’t, we are forced to conclude that one day, millions of years ago, a mutant mosquito was born with a sharper, fully-functional probiscus, as well as the instict to jab it into some critter’s flesh to ante up her protein supply.

From whence came that instinct, which has no apparent connection to any genes responsible for sharp-snout manufacture? Without that instinct, she’d just keeping on drinking sap despite her new, sharper needle.
Did the sharper needle come first and provide an advantage in tapping plants? Did some later mosquito with brain damage and a pointier probiscus get a little confused at some later point and jab a dinosaur when she meant to jab a fern frond? Could a genetic predisposition for animal-plant confusion have thus been passed on to her progeny, who out-competed their cousins whose eggs were nurtured only on sap, and who then passed the instinct along?

Nasty Nanook

I added another useless bit of trivia to my collection this week: Polar bears will happily eat their own kind.

It's the male bears who indulge in such gruesome grotesquery and they pick off baby polar bears, since grown polar bears aren't so easy to dispatch.

This is supposedly a higher species, a creature of great intelligence, not some google-eyed fish with a brain the size of a booger, that could be expected to do such a thing.

In fact, the big boys will stalk a cub for hours through snow and storm, until the exhausted little thing drops to the ground, unable to go on.

Doesn't seem a wise idea for the survival of one's species.

Then again, lions kill lion cubs, too. Not for food but to ensure that only their specific genes get passed on.

Sometimes, life is beautiful, breaktaking. Sometimes it's disgusting.

College nostalgia

I had occasion last night to visit a university in my city. I've long known it was there and wanted to explore it, but just never got around to doing so until now.

If some advanced alien race is ever on the verge of annihilating humanity as a dangerous, useless cosmic parasite, perhaps we can offer our invention of the university in our defense.

I loved my years there, except for finals weeks. I had to work hard to get there and stay there -- three jobs just to pay the bills. So I had no time or energy for keg parties and all that crap. I took the absolute max number of credits that the university would allow me, even though everyone thought I was nuts, and it did about kill me. They stretched my not-so-brilliant mind until it literally did ache.

And I made sure to also take some out-of-the-ordinary courses just for fun, like Bulgarian and botany.

Is there any other place on earth where youthful naivette and intense wisdom so freely mingle? Where arrogance and humility, incredible tolerance and ridiculous intolerance are so freely evident? Where a poor kid from some distant village can sit in the same classroom with a sun-tanned daddy's girl/mama's boy from an exclusive gated community and compete for the same grade?

I prowled every corner of my university -- its art displays and mysterious corners, its every field and building, its every possibility, from the law library to the farm where new strains of plants were being grown.

I miss that energy, that vitality, that wonderful place so much.

Summer dreamin'

It's Monday. The developed world drives to work. Most of said developed world appears to be on the same freeway as me, driving poorly.

It's March. It's cold. We long for sunshine, blue skies and an escape from this daily grind.

Sunshine is in the car now beside me, with its vanity plate reading chx2obx.

In license-plate speak, that either means, Checks to Outer Banks, meaning that the lovely blonde is still paying the bills for her last vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, USA; or, more likely, Chicks to Outer Banks.

Which would be a wistful/hopeful/delightful statement, along the lines of telling the world that she and her girlfriends know where to go to have summertime fun.

A glamorous, long, all-white cigarette burns in her fingers, a pretty sight indeed, and a little consolation awarded to herself for having faced the Monday blues. For a moment I imagine her taking the exit to Carolina instead of Town X, heading to the beach instead of to work, shedding her office wear for something a lot more comfortable and sandproof, parking her suntan lotion, a cold drink and a pack of her favorite cigarettes in the warm sand, stretching out beneath the sun and wiggling her toes, reading a beach book and looking radiant and lovely.

But she is a Responsible Citizen and takes the Town X exit and I continue down the dreary freeway to my own Responsible Citizen destination.