There are things you only need one of in a lifetime.

We live in a disposable society. When our printer cartridge runs dry, we may tell ourselves that we're going to re-cycle it, but it usually it ends up in the trash. So does that fan that doesn't whir anymore. And the socks with holes in them that no one wants. And all the other things that we've run through that are pretty much worn out or defective, to the point that we don't think anyone else would want them. Not even Goodwill.

So where do they go? You know where: the landfill. Shoveled into ditches/trenches with all those other unwanted things, the refuse of our throw-away lifestyle. But hey, I'm not passing judgment: I've consigned shoes with holes in the bottoms and broken vases and even lamps that didn't work (and no one will fix them, right?) to the local landfill, to be buried deep under the earth and have tons more earth poured over them. Someday, far in the future, some 22nd century archeologist may dig it all up and marvel at what we threw away, but that's not our problem. Right now, today, we just want to get rid of all this junk -- and then go out and buy another, maybe better, one!

So what can you buy that you'll probably never throw away? What can you buy one of that will likely stand the test of time?

Let's start with the basics. A potato masher. Made of steel, with a handle of wood. Only job: mashing potatoes. Not hard duty. Likely to outlast you. A metal whisk? Something to whirl around eggs in a favorite dish. Again, easy duty. Not likely to wear out. Knives? Well, they do get worn down with age, but if you have a sharpener, they can easily last a lifetime. Buy a good set and don't worry about it again.

If you're a guy in the garage, a set of tools. I mean basic tools. A hammer, a saw, a set of wrenches, a vise-grip, a drill with bits that can be sharpened. Mankind -- and/or womankind -- will always need these, as they extend our human grasp to make possible the manipulation of different materials. Nails? Keep them, in all sizes. Also screws. We're always going to need to be fastening something to something. And these things don't wear out. If you have a good stockpile of nails and screws, you're covered for whatever dire circumstances may befall you in the future. Be sure you also have a good selection of scewdrivers. Don't scrimp on these, as the cheaper ones wear out way sooner than the good ones. But once you have a good set, you're good forever.

After all, there really isn't such a thing as a new and improved screwdriver. Or hammer. Or saw.

The same for those kitchen tools: buy a potato masher or a collander or certain pots and pans, and you're pretty much all set no matter what happens. I know women who have the pots and pans their mothers used, and they still work just fine. Certain new appliances -- a blender, a fryer, a coffee bean grinder -- may need to be updated as new versions become available, but whoever came up with a new frying pan? Of course there are different coatings to make them non-stick, or copper bottoms to maintain the heat better, but can you really improve on a cast-iron frying pan? Or a cast-iron dutch oven? Come on. If you can't cook in these, then you weren't listening to your grandma when she was trying to teach you how to cook.

I do need to buy a new lawn mower every ten years or so. Maybe even a new washer or dryer.
But I don't need a new shovel or pitch fork or hoe. I may want a bigger, better TV, and that's something that does have to replaced every generation or so as the technology gets better. The same applies to my computer.

Do you see a pattern here?

What needs to be replaced every now and then has to do with technology, not with functionality.
There are tools we've used forever that still do what they were made to do. The shovel, the hoe, the pitchfork. The whisk or potato masher. I've looked at -- even bought and used -- newer versions, and, truth be told, in most cases they weren't any better than the first one I bought.

But consider a certain book I just purchased. (Being a cheapskate, probably from a remainder table or used from Amazon or my local half-price bookstore.) Should I, instead, have paid the big bucks for one of those devices that lets you download books and read them on a screen so that I can whip it out in an airport or wherever I'm stuck for a while and pass the time that way?
So far as I've been able to tell, those devices cost several hundred dollars, and each book you download costs something -- whereas my used copy of a novel that won the Pulitzer last year or the year before probably didn't cost me more than a few bucks. And the device to read it is free: my eyes and brains, working in remarkable synchronicity. And as far as carrying it with me, if it's a paperback, it's not much bigger than a pocket-size pack of Kleenex.

And guess what? I'll never have to buy another copy of that book. In fact, my shelves are full of books I only need one of.

So what else do we only need to buy one of in a lifetime?

I would say a musical instrument -- a guitar, a trombone, a clarinet, a flute. Something your son or daughter grew up learning to play. Maybe you played one yourself. Once all those sounds are digitized, and available on download or through an online synthesizer, there may not be a need for our kids to purchase the actual instrument: they may be able to learn to play online, in virtual time. But won't they miss the actual feel of hand on instrument, the sound of breath into horn? Of course they will, which is why you have to buy your son or daughter an actual instrument, and it's likely to be the only one they'll need in a lifetime. In the olden days, almost any home of sufficient means had a piano in the parlor, and that piano was never replaced by a newer model but was, in fact, passed down to subsequent generations.

One instrument in a lifetime, especially if it's a piano.

In the meantime, I think I'll only buy one wheelbarrow and one tarp to cover what I don't want seen and one copy of Homer, in an accepted translation (which I promise I'll read someday), and one set of good wine glasses or beer mugs (unless my rowdy friends break some), one good office chair, one black suit that I haven't worn yet but that is in pristine condition (complete with vest), and one set of weights that I lift religiously every day or two and that I'll never need to replace because it's all I can lift (and a set of weights is a set of weights).

What about you? What do you only need one of? Well, how about one Bible, if you're so inclined? One comprehensive dictionary: I mean, how many words do you really expect to look up in your lifetime? Maybe one photo of Martin Luther King, Jr or Mother Teresa or Jesus. One of a Kennedy (if you're liberal), one of Reagan (if you're conservative). Maybe one set of fins and snorkle equipment for when you actually make it down to the Bahamas again, or ever. One solid baseball bat. One wedding ring, possibly passed down from your mother or grandmother. One telescope strong enough to let you see the rings of Saturn. One video copy of a movie you really love and that you might want to watch again someday, when your life calms down and you have time.

There are so many things we just go through and discard, but there are fewer that we really want and need just one of. Things that last. It's particular to each of us. It's what helps define us, even to ourselves.

Get out of your car and walk your town.

I don't mean that you should park your car and walk the restored downtown, where everyone is walking from one cool shop to another, maybe stopping for lunch, or at least a latte, before getting back into your car and driving home.

And I don't mean walking the hike-and-bike trails that may snake their way through your town, ending up at the outskirts and maybe leading into wide-open spaces or foothills, etc.

I mean walk the streets of your town as if you didn't own a car and had to make your way, on foot, to the grocery store or wherever, and then back home again.

If you're like me, you live in a town/city where you're used to driving everywhere. You park your car, you get out, you do your business, you get back in your car, and you're off to wherever else, either another store or home.

Stop that and put yourself on foot, on the pavement. It doesn't matter why. Just do it.

I've done it myself twice in the past year or so. Once I left my car in a repair shop and decided not to take their offered ride home. The other time I'll tell you about later.

Okay, so I left my car at the repair place and started home on foot.

At first it felt good. Walking instead of driving. I was getting back in touch with my old physical self. After a block or so, I was remembering that rhythm I used to have. This foot first, then the other, arms swinging just so. It felt good. Hey, I thought, I should do this more often. (I see women in my neighborhood walking like this: they're obviously more in touch with themselves than I am.)

I live in a town/city of 100,000+, so I knew there would be plenty of traffic. What I didn't realize was how fast people drive. Whoa! I was waiting at my first intersection, and the cars were whizzing by at what had to be above the speed limit. So the light finally changed, and I
stepped into the street to cross -- only to hear someone's horn honk. I stepped back, and as I did, a car zoomed across in front of me, having obviously run the red light. I waved to the car I thought had alerted me and made my way across, jogging intstead of walking.

I felt like a rabbit among wolves! They could kill me in an instant.

As I made my way closer to my house -- still a few blocks away -- I thought about how nice it was to be slowing down, just looking at things I hadn't noticed before: the flowers in someone's yard that weren't yet up in mine, the swing in someone's tree like what I'd put up for my own kids years before, the beautifully manicured yard that put mine to shame. More than one person, out tending a lawn or hosing down a driveway, or just out for a smoke, waved to me, and I waved back. On foot, I noticed things I hadn't before. It was kind of nice.

And when you're on foot, just walking, no one thinks you're up to anything. All the bad guys drive by in cars. If you're out for a stroll, you're harmless. And maybe friendly.

I was almost to my house again when someone in a car peeled around a corner and nearly came up on the sidewalk where I was walking. I yelled at him. He paid no attention and kept on driving way too fast through the neighborhood. He was either somone just speeding through or a culpit who would be caught sooner or later for careless driving. Or so I hoped.

I made it home okay and was of mixed mind about my walk-through. I realized a few things: people in cars really don't look out for people on foot; people in cars drive too fast; people on foot get to see things, at a slower pace, than they would otherwise. It was a mixed bag.

The second time I walked through my town was altogether different. I'd had one of my once or twice a year back spasms that left me in pain but knowing that the best thing I could do for it was to get out and, because I couldn't jog, just walk. And not walk as normal but very slowly, like someone older than me. Not quite with a cane but almost. (In fact I have a number of canes, just for that purpose.)

I decided to walk to my neighborhood book store. I was making my very slow way, looking like a much older person, walking upright, hoping my back wouldn't act up and send me to my knees in excruciating pain, which would be embarrassing, when I came to a main artery of my town and a stoplight. This was a street that has two lanes on each side, with cars waiting on both sides, drivers not happy to be stopped and ready to be on their way. I started across, making my way carefully, watching my every step, aware that any mis-step could trigger that awful back pain. I was very much like an old person trying to cross that busy street.

Everything was fine until the light changed, and I wasn't all the way across. I tried to hurry, but I couldn't. Every step was more pain. Horns honked. A car actually came into the intersection and almost reached me. Hey buddy, he seemed to be saying, get a move on!

By the time I'd crossed the street, traffic behind me was moving along.

In the bookstore, everything, of course, resorted to normal. Time slowed down. I was looking at books, especially those on sale. I even sat down in one of the chairs and looked through a few that I might want to buy.

In the end, I did buy one or more and then set out on my trip home.

Well, while I was in the bookstore, it had gotten dark, and I still had to cross that four-lane street, on foot. I stood at the intersection, watching the cars go by -- so fast! I pushed the button that's supposed to let pedestrians cross. I waited. Nothing. Finally the light changed, and I started across. Again, I was moving slowly, as my back was really starting to hurt. I felt, again, like an old person, thinking: Is this what it's like for old people, without cars, to try to cross the street? Well, duh! Of course it is.

When I'd made it across the busy street and was on my way back home, I slowed my pace -- partly because my back hurt but also because I wanted to -- and I smelled the aroma of flowers just coming up in a neighor's yard and heard children playing in the dark in a park not far from my house. Hide-and-seek? That's what it sounded like.

I was walking, in pain but knowing it was doing my back good, past lives that would have escaped me had I been in the car just driving by. A little girl voice cried out: "You're it!"

A block down, I heard a dad call out, "Burgers are on!"

I told myself that I needed to get out of the car and walk more.

Maybe you should, too.

It's time to get rid of the word "assassinate" and replace it with "murder".

The dictionary, at least the one I have at hand (Webster's 9th Collegiate), defines "assassinate" as "to murder by sudden or secret attack usually for impersonal reasons" or (2nd definition) "to injure or destroy unexpectedly and treacherously."

Which definition would you apply to the "asssinations" of (1) Abraham Lincoln, (2) John Kennedy, (3) Ghandi, (4) Rasputin, (5) John Lennon?

Think now. Look back at the definitions and then look at the names. The clock is ticking.

Okay, time's up.

All those people were killed by someone who either opposed them politically or were jealous of their fame and popularity.

Were they "assassinated" or merely "murdered"?

For those of us who grew up in the twentieth century, "assassination" meant killing someone for a political belief. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed because he wanted to bring Afro-Americans into the mainstream of American culture, among other things he stood for. The same could be said of Bobby Kennedy and his big brother, John. They were killed because they were intent on shaking up the status quo, trying to change things politically. So it could be said that they were assassinated: killed for a politcal cause.

But the fact remains that they were all murdered. In the same dictionary, let's look up the definition of "murder": "the crime of killing unlawfully a person, esp. with malice aforethought" or "to kill a human being unlawfully and with premeditated malice."

Those who killed John and Robert and Martin planned it out and then did it, meaning that their crimes were "premeditated". That's murder. Did they have strong political beliefs that made them do it? Maybe. But history has proven that their beliefs were mistaken. They killed for
wrong-headed, even stupid reasons. John and Robert and Martin were right. Their killers were wrong.

Let's look back on our other cases: Lincoln, Ghandi, Rasputin and Lennon.

John Lennon wasn't "assassinated", as he wasn't an office-holder. The disturbed man who shot him wasn't doing it for any political cause. He was a deranged fan, probably jealous of John.

Rasputin was murdered because he'd gained the trust of the Tsarina, but he wasn't about to take over the throne. Someone was jealous of his growing power, and a group of them murdered him.

Ghandi was getting way too popular among the masses of people, so someone high up decided that he needed to be done away with: in other words, murdered.

You might like to think that Lincoln was assassinated, but really he was just murdered. The guy who did it made his way to Lincoln's box in the theatre and shot him with a handgun -- what we might now call a "Saturday night special", the kind any thug or pimp might own. To tell the truth, there was nothing extraordinary about the way Lincoln died: the victim of a handgun owned by someone who shouldn't have owned one. And the guy who shot him was an actor, not a long-time activist who could claim any credentials. Someone looking for his "fifteen minutes" of fame, according to Andy Warhol (who was, himself, once shot by a deranged fan).

Back to John Kennedy: He was murdered by someone up high in that building in Dallas. Who cares what the shooter's political leanings were? Or about all the conspiracy theories that have sprung up since then? The guy who shot him, Oswald, was a troubled "loner" who wanted his own "fifteen minutes". In short, just another murderer, but a murderer of a popular President.

Years later, a "troubled" boy from Colorado (where I live) shot at Reagan -- and left his aide with a permanent brain injury. What was his motivation? Was he trying to rid his country of a despot? No way! He wanted to become famous, or infamous, as the boy who shot Reagan. But he failed, and Reagan went on to be a hero (at least among Republicans) for having survived the attack. (I've heard that the boy, now a man, wants to be let out, at least for family visits, but I think certain crimes require lifetime confinement: endless time to think about what you did.)

None of them was a true assassin. At least according to me.

Here's the only definition of assassin that I accept: Killing a despot, a tyrant, someone who is making life miserable for all his/her subjects. And, at the same time, being willing to die yourself for having done it. There are certainly evil rulers in the world, as there have always been, and they do need to be killed, as it's the only way to get rid of them and their violent/distorted view of the world. Stalin. Idi Amin. Etc. Those who plotted against Hitler -- and nearly killed him but not quite -- qualify as assassins, as they were risking everything to get an evil person out of power and out of his life and theirs. (They paid dearly for not pulling it off, and you don't want to know the details of how it turned out for them. Trust me, you don't.)

But that criterion doesn't apply to anyone in this essay. None of those people, including Rasputin (who I researched at length before I wrote a play about him), were evil incarnate. Hitler was. So was Stalin. And Pol Pot. The aforementioned Idi Amim. They tortured and killed millions of people. Anyone who wanted to kill them could credibly be called an assassin. But you know what? None succeeded. Not one of those assassins managed to carry out their plots. They were all caught and severely punished.

Is there a place, today, for an assassin? Are there leaders of countries who should be killed as the only way to spare those countries from decades of decay and corruption? Of course there are! Would I recommend it?

Not unless you are in that country yourself and are willing to risk death to oppose that leader.

I suspect that thins the crop, as they say. If I were in a country like that, knowing that the military, supported by the government, monitored everything I said or sent out, even by email,
I would be very careful about what I said. But I would remember and write it all down, on paper or by whatever means I had at hand. I would keep a record, even if I had to hide it. And I would try to get it out to others in countries more free than mine.

Would the world pay attention? Maybe, maybe not. Probably after the fact, when it's too late.

As long as there are people in the world who have total control over what their citizens can say, there is always room for assassins. But let's not call them that if they don't deserve it. Whoever killed

Let's get rid of that word or only grant it to heroic people who put their own lives on the line to spare their fellow citizens indignities, including unlawful arrests, torture, and executions, which they will suffer themselves if discovered. In short, you're not a real assassin if you don't put everything you have on the line for what you believe. And only then if history proves you were right. Otherwise, you're just a murderer.

So calling someone an assassin is to dignify the murder he or she might have done out of self-interest or insanity. Anyone who kills another human -- unless in self-defense or to free his/her people from a tyrant--is a murderer. Whoever killed Benazir Bhutto wasn't an assassin but a murderer. She was apparently trying to do what was right for her people, who loved her, and was killed for it. And her murderer wasn't willing to take credit, to stand up and say, "I did it, and here's why." No, it was, as is often the case, someone who did it anonymously and slipped away. Maybe he was caught later -- I don't know -- but if he wasn't willing to put his own life on the line for what he believed by admitting that he'd done it, he's not a true assassin but just another murderer.

John Wilkes Booth ran away after he shot Lincoln and was found in a barn, where he was shot to death. Neither he nor any of the other culprits in this essay stood up in a court of law to say, "I did it because I believed in the cause." They were all hunted down and caught, or not.

So let's abolish this term "assassin" except in extraordinary circumstances, when some brave person puts his/her life on the line to usher a horrible ruler into the afterlife, with whatever consequences, if any, may ensue.

Patrick Henry didn't assassinate anyone but did say, "I know not what course others may take, but, as for me, give me liberty or give me death."

He said it in public, before an assemblage of his countrymen, and he was hanged for it.

Any good, patriotic assassin will stand up and claim responsibility for his or her actions.

The rest are all murderers, and let's call them that.

A radical approach to birth control. Are you ready?

Women are programmed, by biology, to get pregnant and bear children. Men are programmed to implant their semen, bearing sperm, into women to ensure that they become pregnant. It's the way our species and all other species procreate and keep our lines going.

But women today don't always want to get pregnant every time they have sex. Sometimes they just want to have sex for the sheer pleasure of it. But every time a male ejaculates into their vagina, the possibility of getting pregnant exists.

We don't have to get into the whole disturbing problem of women who have been impregnated by men they don't see as future mates -- rape, for sure, but even a one-night stand -- to know that having sex, just because it feels good, shouldn't have such dire consequences for the woman in question.

Isn't there a way we can improve on the old biology of it?

For instance, why not innoculate our daughters -- our sons, too, if we can figure out how to do it -- with some kind of shot that renders them all, at the age of probable conception -- eleven, twelve? -- with something that makes them infertile?

Consider it as a shot, or an implant, that we would give our pre-pubescent daughters, or our lusty young sons, that would render them incapable of becoming pregnant or impregnating anyone? Think of it as an on/off switch. If you want to get pregnant, turn it on. Otherwise, leave it off and have sex as you see fit -- being careful about diseases -- but taking your time
trying to find your ideal mate.

Right now the biological default is toward pregnancy: you have sex often enough, you're bound to get pregnant sooner or later. Somebody's sperm is going to find its way to your ovaries at the wrong time of the month -- and suddenly you're on your way to being a mother, like it or not.

It doesn't have to be that way. Of course we have the pill and condoms and other means of birth control, but men and women don't always use them. In so many parts of the world, including here in the sophisticated U.S. of A., young girls get "knocked up" all the time -- and the dads often skirt right out of view. And we all, the taxpayers -- you and me -- end up paying for all those welfare benefits, etc.

Why not use science to come up with a way to stop fertilization in its tracks? Implant young girls with something that keeps them from becoming pregnant in the first place? And then give them a way to turn off that device when they really do meet Mr. Right and want to have kids?

I'm not sure if we have the ability to do this, but I can assure you that if men were the ones having unwanted children, hauling them around in their bodies and then delivering them, often in great pain, we would have had a solution to this problem long ago. Men are wimps when it comes to pain and responsibility. Take it from me: I'm one of them.

So here's my proposal: Let's come up with a vaccine or implant or whatever that renders all pre-pubescent girls, eleven or twelve years old (guys later, but let's work on it) infertile. In short, they can't get pregnant. Right now, according to biology, they can. But we're short-circuiting that and saying they can't. So if some one rapes them -- be it a degenerate father or a member of some outlaw band in their own country -- they will certainly suffer the psychic wounds but won't end up pregnanat. They are, until they decide otherwise, infertile. No eggs, no baby.

But, as I said before, let's have a switch they can turn when and if they really do want to conceive with a certain guy (Mr. Right). Whatever the mechanism, they could do it. Un-plug this or plug in that. Take some drug or stop taking some drug. Whatever.

Wouldn't this liberate women in a way that hasn't happened since the advent of The Pill?

I don't know if it's possible, but I'll bet it is. Check with your doctor. Write your Congress person. Women's liberation is entering a new era. Freedom from unwanted pregnancy!

Spread the word!

And long live the wonderful women in my life and the others I haven't had the privilege of knowing!

The next Nobel Prize winner would eliminate pain.

Have you ever been in such pain that you couldn't imagine enduring any more?

If so, you've probably been (1) a cancer patient in the last stages, (2) a torture victim, (3) an expectant mother, (4) a sufferer of chronic back pain or of some nervous disorder/disease. Of course there are other examples, but these are among the most common.

The question I'm sure they would all ask is this: What is this pain for? Why am I enduring it?

Pain is supposed to be, so far as I can tell, nature's way of telling us that we need to stop doing something. It hurts too much! But if the pain is inflicted by others (torture) or by our own bodies (cancer, childbirth, back pain, etc.), there is no way we can stop it -- so what's its purpose?

I'm one of those people who thinks that nature -- meaning all of us and all the other phenomena we experience, from scenery to the stars to the woods and on and on -- has some kind of plan. I don't say a god designed it, but something did. Why do I say that? Because it works, and it works whether we're here or not. It worked before we were here, we humans, and it will work long after we're gone. If we disappeared from the planet tomorrow, some kind of life would go on.

But pain only started when nervous systems first developed in living beings. I mean, glaciers feel no pain. Neither do mountains, rising up from some underwater disturbance. We also think trees and all the plants in the world feel no pain. Does a carrot flinch when you yank it up for the earth? Not likely. The same for onions, leeks, potatoes, et al.

So what was the first species to feel pain? Not being a scientist, I don't know. I suspect that the tiniest of us, amoebas or whatever, probably don't feel pain. But do earthworms when they're dragged out of the earth and pierced with a fishing hook that we thread all the way through their bodies (to keep them properly hooked)? I don't know. Do you? From my experience, they do seem to jerk around and maybe wish it wasn't happening to them.

I once witnessed life and death on a small scale in my backyard, when some kind of bug went after another one, actually darting out and spearing it so that liquid from the other's body started spewing. I mean these were tiny creatures -- the size of a pain pill -- but something brutal happened, and the second creature, this little bug, went still, couldn't move, while the first one, about the same size but obviously the predator, sat back on a leaf and waited for the other one to die (and be consumed, I assume). I have to admit that I didn't stay to see the final scene:
I had a lawn to mow -- and probably mowed up both of them in the process. But did the bug that was attacked feel pain? Do flies trapped in a spider's web and injected with venom that paralyzes them feel pain? How about gazelles run down by lions and killed? At what level does pain kick in?
Usually we can say it's mammals that share our animal instincts and fears and maybe pain. But wouldn't you think a frog or a turtle eaten by a crocodile would feel some pain? How about a small fish eaten by a larger one? A shark may chomp and swallow someone whole, but what about piranhas that attack bigger fish, and even animals wading in the shallow waters, taking litle bites, but in a swarm, until the large prey just collapses? Wouldn't that hurt? There was a torture in the old, old days called something like "death from a thousand cuts," in which small strips of flesh were sliced from the unfortunate condemned person, one by one, until he/she died, probably of shock to his/her system. But think of the pain! Ouch! That's what piranhas do. Unlike humans, though, they're not trying to torture: it's the way they eat. But still . . .

For sure we can say that our pets experience pain: we've all seen a cat or dog whimpering or mewling from a bite or a thorn in the paw or some other problem. Hey, vets make a living from our pets' pain.

What we can say for sure is that humans feel pain. And since we're all humans, let's start there. And where we need to start is at the point where pain serves a purpose and where it just hurts and needs to go away.

If I burn myself by touching a hot stove, I learn not to do that again. If I have a pain in my side, I may need to get that diagnosed and treated. Pain serves a useful purpose for us humans, an alert sytem. My throat hurts every time I cough. Get it looked at. That sore on my foot just gets worse and worse and won't heal and hurts all the time. Get it looked at. The body is saying to you that something is out of whack.

But it's pretty obvious, as I said earlier, that there are times when pain serves no purpose at all.
Take for instance the last stages of cancer. The patient is going to die. Why suffer further? Or giving birth. The expectant mother is going to expel that beloved child from her body. Why does she have to suffer? (And forget all that curse of Eve nonsense.) Or, maybe the most troubling case of all: the torture victim. The only function pain is going to serve in that instance is to make the sufferer reveal the names of trusted allies or give up secrets. Our nerve endings are so constructed that, under duress, they can make us absolutely crazy and provoke behaviors that, in our right minds, lounging by the pool with a nice drink, we would think unthinkable. Turn over our friends, our family, to despots? No way, we think, until the electrodes are in place.

So why hasn't someone done something about the problem of pain? Physical, nerve-related pain that can turn the smartest and most accomplished of us into spies and traitors and outright cowards? Into weeping shadows of ourselves, ashamed to have our loved ones see us as we beg to die and put out of our misery? Why do I even have to bring this up?

In short, why hasn't someone come up with a way for us normal humans who may find ourselves in extraordinary circumstances to shut off the pain response in our bodies? Why isn't there a switch that we could hit or turn that would block the nerve impulses that make possible torture and the intolerable suffering that many of us in the end-stages of our lives have to go through?

Yes, there are drugs that will do it. But we don't all have access to them when we need them. I saw more than one young man dying in Viet Nam who was ushered into death by morphine, and it was truly miraculous: their faces went slack, their voices calmed, and they muttered their last words in a world of no pain. But can we all count on having morphine when we need it?

Why can't we -- why haven't we -- come up with a way to turn off the pain trigger?

There must be a place in the brain -- maybe more than one -- that controls the realization, the sensation of pain. (Obviously so, or how else would paralysis victims feel no pain in those limbs?)
So why hasn't someone tried to pinpoint it and teach us how to control it? Maybe mind control, but more likely some kind of implant that we could turn on or off as needed.

Take this for an example: You live in a country that is controlled by the military, and they arrest you on whatever bogus charge and haul you in and sit you in a chair and threaten to pull out your fingernails if you won't tell them the names of your friends. In normal circumstances, you would be terrified, and once they'd pulled out your left thumbnail with pliers, slowly, you might be willing to name all your friends and their friends, too, not to mention everyone in your family. But suppose you didn't feel the pain. Suppose they pulled that thumbnail out, and you saw that you were losing it -- bye bye -- but you didn't feel the excruciating pain of it. You might decide that the cause you're a part of is so important that you can lose all those nails -- and maybe a finger or two -- before you give up the information they want.

In other words, what if the torturer lost his most important weapon -- your pain?

Think about it.

And what if, on a simpler/lower level, that back pain you've known for so long that has kept you from doing what you wanted to do but that's just a result of a pinched nerve, disappeared? What if, by hitting this chemical/neurological switch, you shut off the pain? After all, there really wasn't anything wrong with you in the first place; it was just your nerves malfunctioning. Your back is perfectly fine otherwise.

Pain is important to alert us to dangers: cut yourself with a knife, get bitten by a rattlesnake, break your arm while skate-boarding, and you know you need to take some action -- and also avoid doing those things that brought on the pain in the first place. But pain in our lives, for us humans, has gone overboard: it attacks us when there's really nothing we can do to relieve it and when we're way past its intended danger signal.

So why not just get rid of it? Not in all cases, but in some. Maybe what I'm talking about is a sci-fi novel in which, in some future time, we've found the pain trigger in our brains and figured out how to disable it when necessary. Have it working most of the time but, when it's not needed, or when it's going to cause us unnecessary misery, shut it down. The torturer appears with his hideous and terrifying instruments and nasty smile? Shut it down. The doctor says we have two weeks to live, and they're not going to be fun? Shut it down. The back acts up, but we know we're in good shape? Shut it down. The baby is due, maybe overdue, and the pain is getting to our breaking point? Shut it the f*ck down!

Pain is a friend but a deadly enemy, too. Can't we control it? Wouldn't that be worth a Nobel Prize? When my own bad back starts acting up, I'd be willing to chip in few bucks.

Pretty people aren't like you and me.

The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the rich are not like you and me, and his fellow novelist Hemingway countered by saying something like they had more money.

But Fitzgerald was right in his own way. Those who are rich don't live the lives most of us live, replete with bills and worries and all that goes with trying to earn a living every day.

The same, in a way, goes with those of us who are pretty. And you know who I mean and what I mean -- and who you are. There are some of us blessed with really good looks (not me). Our faces are so well proportioned that we're looked at from an early age, and often rewarded,
because of it.

When I was in high school, we had a section of the yearbook devoted to "Most" whatever. One of them was "Most Beautiful." Also "Most Handsome." All you had to do to gain that distinction was to be beautiful or handsome. No other character traits applied. The girl or boy who was elected had those facial features that we most value in our society: wide-spaced eyes, not too big nose, full lips, clear skin, etc. There is no way to describe what we call "beauty," but we know it when we see it. Every society around the world has its own standard, but the Western look is the one that has prevailed so far. Angelina Jolie is uninversally recognized as pretty, right? So was Elizabeth Taylor when she was younger. So was Marilyn Monroe. So were the Most Handsome and Most Beautiful boy and girl in your own yearbook.

And whoever/wherever you are, you know a pretty person when you see one, no?

They pop up everywhere. Not just in Hollywood but in your own office or on the street. They are the products of a fickle nature that also produced us, who maybe don't look too bad but who wish we had better hair, a smaller nose, fuller lips, higher cheek-bones, etc. Most of us look okay and match up with mates who look more or less okay. And we produce children who typically look at least as good as the two of us, sometimes even better.

But it's undeniable that there are people who, through nothing they've done to deserve it, are better-looking than the rest of us. Like those people who are born smarter than us -- by absolute chance -- they have an un-fair advantage from the start. They are recocognized early, even as children, as being more attractive, maybe even beautiful. And it can direct their lives in ways they don't and can't predict, depending on how they deal with it.

If they -- and I'm thinking girls here -- decide to cash in on it, they're going to have only a brief open window before they start to age and are competing with girls younger and even prettier. The rodeo queen, the "Most Beautiful" who tries for a career as a model or, even loftier, a star in Hollywood, is probably/usually going to be disappointed.

But they will nevertheless, and along the way, always be singled out for their good looks. Studies
have shown that teachers, even in the early grades, favor the pretty people, not necessarily calling on them most often -- as they're not always the smartest -- but giving them the benefit of the doubt in grade issues. And they're most likely to be hired when all else is equal. If you're up against a pretty person, male or female, for a job, and you're equally qualified, good luck. The pretty person is likely to prevail.

Why?

Because that's who the boss is going to be looking at every work day for the foreseeable future, and he/she would rather look at the pretty person.

Another factor that has to figure in, though, is who's hiring. Usually it's men. Need I say more?

I once heard a gorgeous actress say that being attractive was more a curse than a blessing.
I wanted to slap her face. Try being plain, I wanted to say to her. Or less than plain. No matter how smart.

As Bessie Smith (I think) once said, "I've been poor, and I've been rich, and rich is better." I've never been pretty, but I've known people who were, and are, and if they're being honest, I suspect they'd all admit that pretty is better.

I knew a guy in the army who was extremely nice-looking and had Paul Newman eyes: so blue that they made me look twice to sure my own olive drab eyes weren't playing tricks on me. I remember walking into a coffee shop with him once, and the waitress serving us never once looked at me, just stared at him, mouth open, and then dropped her gaze and stuttered as she took our order.

He knew he was pretty and used it to his advantage. He told me he got that kind of treatment
not only from waitresses but from teachers and bank tellers -- and even from commanding officers: he'd been promoted more than once over men who were better qualified. "Hey," he said to me, "You got the brains -- I got the looks."

At twenty-one, I'd have taken the looks. (In weak moments now, I still might.)

Mercifully, as we grow older, looks matter less, but the pretty person still holds center stage.
If you check out the society page of any major newspaper, you'll see that the prettiest people get all the press. In a big city close to where I live, it's the well-endowed blond wife of the owner of a professional sports team, who I'm sure is a fine person in her own right but who comes across in pictures as someone whose job is to keep her husband proud to be the owner of such a babe. It's almost a given that she's had "work" done on her face (or will in time) and uses a push-up bra (or will in time). Regardless of who she really is, deep down inside, she comes across, at least in photos, as someone whose job it is to be pretty and to stay pretty as long as humanly possible.

They say that in real estate, the three most important things are location, location, location.

I say that in celebrity marriages, the three most important things (for the woman anyway) are looks, looks, looks.

I understand why these pretty women have to snag the older (rich) guys. It's the only way they can keep feeling -- and looking --young and beautiful. But isn't it funny that the guys that they might have dismissed when they were in high school have, over time, become the only ones who can allow them to perpetuate that fantasy of youth and beauty? I love it! The nerd's revenge! You wouldn't date me in high school or even college, but now that I'm rich, you're not just willing to be seen in public with me but to actually marry me!

On the other hand -- and there is another hand -- the truly pretty people among us who are also smart do have a hard time downplaying their prettiness when they want to to be taken seriously. I can think of Robert Redford, for one, who has actually grown scruffy facial hair to offset his good looks, and the aforementioned Paul Newman, maybe, who took on a wide variety of movie roles that had nothing to do with being handsome. (Brad Pitt does the same thing nowadays.) But what about the women? Can you think of a pretty film star who has become a "character" actress in her later years? Julia Roberts tries, with mixed success. Years ago there was Julie Christie, who was so sexy in "Shampoo" and other movies but who played, just last year, an older woman who was losing her mind. And even Angelina Jolie won her Oscar for playing a disturbed young woman. It's hard to hide your good looks. So I applaud all who try to!

Beauty has its advantages -- and don't you beautiful people tell me it doesn't -- but it also has its "shelf life". At some point, we're all back to where we started: just people trying to figure it all out and piece together a meaningful existence. So if you're a pretty person, by all means enjoy it.
But know that it won't last and pace yourself accordingly. Plan for the time when people say, "She/he was so pretty. Remember?"

Good luck!

SOME ANIMALS PLAY. SOME DON"T. WHAT'S UP WITH THAT?

We've all seen otters cavorting on TV shows, diving and coming up from the water, seeming to have a great time. And even lions: the dad lying still somewhere on the savanna, obviously full of antelope or whoever, while his cubs wrestle in and on and around him. And birds of all varieties, from crows to hawks, soaring up on un-seen winds, gliding without even a flap, just enjoying the experience denied to us humans: flying.

Species at play, having a good time being themselves, right? No humans in sight. In other words, doing what they would be doing if we didn't exist.

But where does that sense of play start? Obviously, we humans have it: Lord, we'd be lost if not for all our sports. But is it a mammal thing? Do only furred animals -- coyotes, wolves -- that suckle their young know the meaning of "play"?

Let's take it down a notch. Reptiles. Snakes and turtles and frogs. Do they understand the concept of "play"? Of just having fun? Probably not. They're all about eating or being eaten.

What about fish in our aquarium? Those tetras and others who swim around, with no predators in sight. Are they enjoying themselves? Or are they just looking for those flakes of fish food we sprinkle on the surface of the tank whenever we think of it? They don't seem to be having fun, do they?

We know, from biology, that most species are concerned with reproducing, replicating their own, for whatever reason: just numbers, I guess, although I've never been comfortable with that. Why just keep churning out more and more of you who all look the same and who will do the same, ad infinitum? Why this urge to re-produce more and more of yourself?

I'll leave it to the scientists to figure out. It baffles me.

So where, on the evolutionary ladder, do creatures start to "have fun"? Where do they start to play?

We know monkeys play. We've seen them in zoos, flitting from branch to branch, hooting and seeming to have a good time. Back it up a bit. What about squirrels? They flit from branch to branch, too, but so far as I can tell, they're still pretty much looking for something to eat. I don't see them interacting with each other very often, just clowning around. From what I've seen of them on by backyard deck, they're just looking to feed themselves and not be attacked. Not much fun.

Who else? Well, of course domesticated dogs like to play: fetch the stick, get an ear rub or a belly rub, etc. They may be our best guage of where to draw the line. Dogs do seem to like to play.

What about domesticated cats? We'd like to think they play, but their play is often a subset of stalking a prey: they attack a ball of yarn like it was a downed bird. They don't often engage their young in play activities: instead they seem to be teaching them how to hunt. They do like our strokes, but cats are so selfish that it's all about them. Not sure what that's all about.

So what is the earliest, most primitive animal that we can say, with confidence, actually plays?

Well, dolphins seem to play. Like certain birds, they appear to enjoy just swimming in their environment, diving and surfacing, having a good time. And they even interact with us from time to time, letting us pet them in theme parks, which the birds don't do.

But I can't think of another animal in the ocean that plays. Sharks don't. Do whales? I'm not sure. They spend so much time way down deep that it's hard to map their activities.

So here's what I'm thinking: the first animals who know to play are our domesticated dogs.

There is no other species that we humans have made our own, so to speak. We can own ocelots or raccoons or chimpanzees, but, in the end, they are likely to revert to their natural instincts and turn against us, maybe even attack us. And sometimes even a dog species -- the pit bull being a prominent example -- will, from time to time, revert to its "animal" instincts and try to eat our faces (and maybe succeed in doing it). We have to be careful when we try to humanize animals, expecially those who may have been bred, by humans, to fight and attack.

Sometimes we're just hoping, against hope, that we can civilize what is a wild animal.

Back to the original question: What animals play?

Otters, dolphins, dogs, and sometimes cats. Lions and coyotes and wolves, but only among themselves. Those cute prairie dogs that stand up and look around, almost like us? Meerkats?Maybe. But no turtles or lizards or snakes. I'm not sure about rabbits. Do they play, or are they just always on the alert for trouble?

My daughter once had a hamster when she was a kid. One night she sat on it and killed it. It had crawled under a pillow or wherever. It was never a companion, believe me. Rodents aren't good pets. Would that one have played with another one? We never found out, but my guess is no. If we'd had another one, I'm guessing that they would be racing each other for the food dish. Not much friendly tussling. Just that old boring survival instinct. Ho hum.

What we humans want are animals that enjoy each other, that can be friends, that want to play.
And that want to play with us, their owners. And I'm afraid that leaves us with dogs and cats.
They are the only animals that are totally domesticated -- meaning they can live with us without fear of us and without being too difficult. And sometimes they even enjoy being with each other.
Dogs and cats can play, often together, if uneasily. They will not likely kill each other, just growl
occasionally or hiss but otherwise tolerate each other. They are animals we can live with. And they've learned to like us, or at least tolerate us. (I'm sorry, but I'm not one who thinks that your cat actually "likes" you. You give him or her food, and maybe you smell good, to the cat, but you could be replaced any time by someone who does the same. Give it whatever name you want -- Fluffy or Hemingway or whatever -- but your cat is only interested in the food.)

That still doesn't answer the question, though: at what point do animals know how to play?

I would say that it's mammalian, that no reptiles do it. Maybe some fish can. And some birds. But they're beyond our reach. We can't domesticate them, turn them to our purpose, own them.

Only dogs and cats have been smart enough to embrace and entertain us humans -- and so insure themselves a cushy life. Even the meanest of us loves a dog or a cat and lavishes all kinds of luxuries on it. Sometimes that beloved pet is the only one left who loves us, and we spend our last dollar keeping it fed. We may suffer, but we love to see our pet at play.

Dumb animals? Maybe not so dumb after all.

What animals play? Dogs for sure. Cats maybe. Dolphins probably. Birds? Who knows?

It's all part of the great mystery of life, and I say, play on!

Learn to talk to everyone, even if you think they aren't as smart as you.

Yes, I know this sounds elitist, like I'm smarter than you, blah blah blah. But it's probably true, with some conditions. I am likely smarter than you about some things, but you're likely smarter than me about others. It depends on what we're talking about.

You may know more than me about the plumbing in my house, or the electrical wiring, or how to get rid of weeds or squirrels in the attic. All those practical things at which I'm a klutz, a dolt.

But I may know more than you about literature and the arts, or about finance or medicine or nuclear physics, which may make me think that I can talk down to you -- or just not talk to you at all because it would be a waste of my valuable time and also because it might lead you to think that I want some kind of relationship with you.

I have to resist that impulse. Why? Because it's not nice, but also because it puts up a barrier between us that is artificial and that is insulting and that serves no good purpose.

Let's back up and assume that you own a house. Something goes wrong with it, as it inevitably will. Something in the plumbing, the wiring, the whatever.

A guy comes to the house to work on it. How do you talk to him? Or do you talk to him at all?

One impulse is to assume that he's someone who didn't go to college and so doesn't know about anything you like to talk about. But hold on a minute. Do all your conversations have to be about your special area of knowledge? In other words, I'm saying why not a few minutes of what we call "chitchat"? After all, he probably doesn't want to waste his time talking to you at length any more than you want to waste yours talking to him for more than a minute or so. In fact, he's likely to be paid by the job, meaning how many hours he has to spend on it, meaning that your talking with him only prevents his getting to another job -- and may add to your cost, too.

But that doesn't mean the brief time you spend together has to be awkwardly silent. "Thanks for coming on such short notice." "How's it going?" "This your last job of the day? Get to go home after this?" "I'll be in the basement if you need me. Just call down the stairs." "Sorry for the mess on the counter, but I haven't been able to wash dishes for a couple of days." Etc.

In some cases, you might learn something you didn't know that could come in handy sometime. For instance, an appliance repair guy came to my house once to fix the ice-maker in our freezer that had stopped making ice. He didn't just fix it but -- being a friendly, talky type -- insisted on showing me how the mechanism worked and what had gone wrong. Guess what? Next time it happened, I fixed it myself!

And yes, it is quite likely that you're smarter -- by measured I.Q. -- than many of the folks who work for you or who you come in contact with on a subway or bus or wherever. But it's not always a good idea to presume that they're less fortunate, less happy, that they're doing what they're doing because they made bad decisions in life; that may well be true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're miserable or that they wish they could be in whatever lofty, well-paid, "important" profession that you're in. They may be quite content with the life they live.

There's a woman who cleans my house once a week, doing all the stuff I don't want to do, and whenever she's here, we chat. About her kids, about my kids, about whatever. She's not stupid.
Am I smarter? Probably, just in terms of verbal range and "book-learning"and maybe even higher reasoning dexterity. But she's still a friendly, interesting person with a life of her own that seems to suit her just fine -- and she even laughs at my lame jokes. And hey, she invites her relatives to Thanksgiving dinner and cooks for them all. Could I do that? No way.

I bought groceries not long ago and pushed my cart to the check-out. The tag on the clerk's shirt says he's worked at the same job, at the same store, since 1979. I say, "You've worked here for 30 years? I'll bet you're getting pretty good at it by now." A clerk at a neighboring register laughs and says, "He's the best!" Then my clerk says he's due to retire in another five years. He and his wife both; she works in a clothing store downtown. They recently bought a boat that they've moored at their little cabin on a nearby river and are happily looking forward to the time they can do nothing but fish and walk in the woods and entertain their grandchildren.

So here's a guy I might have dismissed as "not smart enough" to talk to because he's worked in a grocery store all his adult life. Turns out he has a better retirement plan than me!

We never know how certain people ended up in certain jobs. There are many famous writers and artists who, finding no market for their work early on, did menial work just to pay the rent or get money for groceries. The clerk you dismiss as a minimum-wage employee you don't need to talk to may turn out to be someone whose works fetch millions someday in a museum or whose book turns up on the best-seller list.

But that's not why we should talk to those we don't think are as smart as we are. It's the simple
human thing to do. It costs nothing, and it's easy. It's pleasant, even kind of fun.

"Looks like spring, but you never know," you might say to the clerk at the Dollar Store. She says in return, "Remember that blizzard we had in March a few years back?" You say, "Yeah, I guess we're never out of the woods, huh?" "Take it easy." "You, too."

Or you're paying for gas at the 7-11, and you decide to pick up a breakfast burrito, too. "Are these made locally?" you ask. "Yeah," the guy behind the counter says. "Mama Rosa's, out on the highway. She brings 'em in every morning." "Hey, I've passed that place lots of times. Is the food good?" "The best," he says as he gives you your change. "Try to tamales. Smothered."
"I'll do it," you say, and you mean it. As you're headed for the door, he says, "Come by after eleven some morning, and those burritos are half-price -- if we have any left." "Hey thanks," you say.

Simple human interaction. It's what it's all about, no?

On some level, we're all the same. Of course some of us have "made it" and have lots more money than others, but what if you, being rich right now, suddenly lost everything and had to talk to other people not from your higher perch but nose to nose? Couldn't happen, you say? It happened in Nazi Germany, and it happens all over the world even today. In other words, what if tomorrow you were stripped of your position, your standing in society, your belongings, and forced to make your way in a world where being smarter didn't give you any advantage?

Would you be able to talk to your fellow humans? Have you retained that ability -- or have you lost it somewhere along the way? Or did you never have it?

Some of us prosper here on Earth, some of us struggle, but, in the end, we're all basically in it together, more or less alike underneath our circumstances. Poverty and/or lack of education makes life harder for some of us, while wealth and learning puff others of us up shamelessly. But if we subtract certain factors that we often have no control over -- how we look, how "smart" we are, what kind of family we came from -- we're all just mortal humans, looking for the same things: ease and love and something beyond ourselves and our short lives to hope for.

Good luck to us all.

Now let the chitchat begin!

Only humans have to look for jobs.

In this current financial crisis, when lay-offs and outright firings are at a high we haven't seen for many years, when so many people in our country are out of a job and looking for another one, with --it seems -- almost everyone else competing with us for the most menial of jobs, from dishing up burgers at a drive-thru to scrubbing toilets at a motel, it's time to ask ourselves how we got into this mess in the first place.

But that's a subject for the economists or the financial "experts" who somehow didn't see this coming and didn't warn us.

Right now, lots of us are just looking for jobs. Jobs we would never have considered taking a few years ago but that we're now competing for. Ouch!

Let's step back a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder. Nobody but us humans has to look for a job. Why? Because, before we appeared on the scene, every species had its order: look for food. All day long. Feed yourself and feed your family. That was the rule.

We Americans don't have to look for food because it's in our neighborhood grocery store. But the way we got the means to buy that food was via a job that paid us a certain amount to do a certain amount of work. But then that job we had disappeared, along with our paycheck, and our family still had to be fed.

What now?

Animals don't have to deal with that because they're looking for food pretty much all the time.

Whether you're a worm nosing around blindly underground or a coyote or a hawk looking for an un-suspecting prairie dog, you're always on the make for something to eat. And if you're that prairie dog, you're also looking for something to eat -- while watching for coyotes and hawks. And if you're that worm in the ground, I'm not sure what you're looking to eat, but I know you hate those spring rains that leave you sprawled on the pavement, drowning in your underground chamber, making your way to the surface, to the light, only to be sprawled on someone's driveway or walk, waiting to be eaten by crows.

Nature is a harsh teacher. This eats that, which eats that. Endless. Always nasty. Brutal.

But back to humans. Only we have to move beyond that eating chain and do real work that doesn't come naturally to us but that we have to do to be able to go to the grocery store and buy all that food that we used to kill and eat ourselves, or grow, that sustained us. In the pioneer days, we were part of that natural order. The very first of us who settled this nation did just what the animals do: we killed to eat. (And tried not to get eaten by something else.)

But now we don't. We can buy our foods -- even our meats -- killed and packaged by someone else, so that we can pick and choose among our cuts, not knowing what part of the animal we're buying. But we've lost something in the process because we aren't important in the great scheme of things. We don't grow or produce anything. We have "jobs", which only exist as long as the company or institution we work for deems them worthwhile. We could, and can, lose them in the blink of an eye. Sorry, you're fired. Clean out your desk.

And then what?

Animals don't lose jobs. They come into the world knowing what they need to do: find enough food to sustain yourself and your family, if you have one. Breed. That's about it.

It's only us humans who too often find ourselves with no function to perform in the world and with no way of sustaining ourselves and our families. We've sort of over-evolutionized ourselves.
We have big brains that are adapted to our new world, but we've lost the old instincts for survival so that when no one needs our brains, we're out of a job and are like animals released again into the wilderness, or the jungle, totally un-prepared to deal with all those old dangers.

Only humans have to look for jobs. Only humans have to make out resumes. The animals of the world are programmed to look after themselves, to provide for their families, to kill or be killed, to know what to eat and what not to eat. How to look after, and rear, their young.

We humans have been spoiled. Too many pre-packaged foods, too much reliance on paychecks and micro-waves. Too little on growing our own and conserving. Too much on conveniences, too little on relying on our own minds. Why so much TV? Why not more reading? Why so many movies on DVD? Why not more conversation, walks, talking to each other? Things that don't cost anything but that stimulate our minds even more than the media can give us?

I'm thinking that the more we get back to being like the animals, spending our time moving around and looking for something good to eat, and the less we spend keeping in constant contact with each other -- via cel phones, etc. -- the better off we may be. Of course that's "retro" thinking, but consider this: What if your electricity went off tonight and stayed off for a week?
Or more?

It's actually happened in the Northeast, in Vermont and New Hampshire and New York. Other parts of the country as well. It could happen to you. To any of us.

I'm talking about all electricity: that which powers your house but also your home phone and even your cel phone. Suppose you were out of contact with everyone for a week.

Could you stand it?

And then your boss tells you, because of the power-shutdown, that you shouldn't come into work the next day. Or any day in the near future, while they try to get it fixed. But how would he tell you? You have no contact with him/her or anyone else. Maybe no one answers the phone at your place of employment. For a whole week. Or more.

Suddenly you're back to being a pioneer. No electricity. No power for the lights or for the fridge or the microwave.

When the sun goes down, you're in the dark. Did you buy candles? Does anyone remember where they are?

And what if this went on for weeks? Everything in the freezer would be spoiled. You would cook what you could, and then what?

Suppose such a black-out went on for months?

You would dig around in the pantry and eat what you had in in cans -- no heat -- but then what?

You're out of food. And, because the electricity is still out, the grocery stores can't ring up your orders, so they have to shut down. The bank can't process your ATM orders for cash. You don't have any money. Your company has long since shut down. Your kids are hungry.

What now?

Well, you're back where the animals are and were from the earliest of times.

What do you/we do? Start eating each other?

We'll likely never reach this point, but it's always worth considering. Only humans have to look for jobs, but we might always all be better off thinking of how much worse it could be --and stop griping so much about how bad we have it. It can always be worse.

I mean, after all, would you rather be trying to run down and kill your supper tonight? When that work -- our job -- disappears, we're back to scavenging for food to feed our families.

Animals never find themselves in this kind of predicament. They don't have "jobs". They spend all their days (and maybe nights) looking for something to eat.

But how many of us want to resort to rummaging through dumpsters or, worse, tracking down and eating each other? There has to be a better way. Being a good liberal, I think government should provide a bottom, a shelter, a place below which you can't sink. A kind of survival cushion. But that's just me. Others have other opinions.

What's yours?

Men have "that dick thing" going for them.

I heard this from a woman a long time ago. But it could have been yesterday. I said to her something like "I'm glad to see that, in my lifetime, men and women are beginning to be treated equally," and she said, "Yeah, but men still have that dick thing going." This was a very smart woman, and I spent some time thinking about what she meant. (She didn't help me on it, just rolled her eyes like I should understand.)

So what is "that dick thing"? Obviously, it refers to the penis, which I have and she doesn't. But what does that have to do with the way men and women are treated in society? Being a young man in the Sixties, when women asserted their power -- which I bowed to, always thinking women to be much smarter and kinder than men -- I had to wonder if I'd gained some advantage just by being male. (I don't think so, in my own particular case, but I don't deny that it happens in a male-dominated society.)

But if we put all that socio-political stuff aside, did my male organ give me some advantage that I hadn't thought of? Did having a penis actually give me some advantage over her and other women? In a worst-case scenario, it did, as I could over-power a woman and insert my erect penis into her un-willing vagina. That's called rape, of course, and it's been used by dastardly men since time immemorial to assert dominance. Often the women are impregnated and have to decide to whether or not to bear the un-asked-for child. So shameful that it almost doesn't deserve serious discussion. Such men need to be dealt with harshly.

Back to a more practical, down-to-earth consideration: I've always thought of my penis as an unreliable instrument. When I was young, it was very often, and for no apparent reason, rigid. Sometimes that was opportune, sometimes just embarrassing. Sometimes it rose to the occasion, on the right occasion, and sometimes it didn't. And I had no control over it. I might be wildly attracted to someone, who was in the mood, but the penis decided to hibernate. How embarrassing! It's happened to all men at some time.

Now, you have to admit, ladies, that you can accommodate a male partner, even when you're not "in the mood", with lubricants, but men can't "rise to the occasion" in those instances without a drug like Viagra, which works but which also raises a man's blood rate and puts him at risk of a stroke or heart attack. Men are so desperate to have their penises "perform" that they're willing to risk death to impress you. But that's just guy being guys, right?

What is this fascinaton with the male member all about anyway? This "dick thing"? Literature is full of what we old English majors know as "phallic symbols", meaning things that suggest a, pardon the expression, dick. Pillars on old temples and totem poles or anything standing upright. But what women might assume is the holy symbol of male fertility and, by extension (pardon the pun), dominance over the females in their lives, is really a source of great insecurity among males.

How big is mine? Is his bigger than mine? Longer? Wider? Does it matter? (To her?)

Men worry all the time about their penises. An anatomical feature that is visited, for better or worse, upon each of us, it's the subject of much anxiety. Men are not like women, who talk about everything in great detail, but men do notice -- in the shower room at gyms or in shared facilities in the army or wherever -- the relative shapes and lengths of each other's intimate organs. And we do wonder if it makes a difference.

Men also grow up watching much more pornography than women do (another positive nod to the women), and what we see are men with ENORMOUS DICKS! I mean, things that stick out a foot or more! I'm not kidding! So we men get more than a little intimidated; our own dicks probably shrink just to think of what we've witnessed. And, of course, the women in the porn movies are ecstatic to have those huge things poked into them: lots of moaning and screaming that we know we've never evoked from any women we've had sex with.

So, women friends of mine and women in general, guys really DON'T have "that dick thing going." We are insecure about our penises and are hoping that it's not the way you judge us and select us as your mates. We probably, most of us, have one about six inches long at its max, and are hoping that our love for you, our value of you, our lust for you, is enough, and that your own internal structures are just right for accommodating what we have to offer. And we're hoping that you'll look beyond "that dick thing" and see us as potential mates who are also looking beyond "that dick thing". Believe me, we want to look beyond it.

I mean, if you think about it, would you want to be judged just by the size of your breasts?
Yes, I know that you are, but there's a difference. Breasts, except for nursing purposes, are really ornamental. A penis, on the other hand, is a performance tool, and if the performance is lacking, a beautiful relationship can be ruined. I've known, as you may have, solid marriages that fell apart because some guy's penis didn't function as it should, as he wanted it to, at the right time. That doesn't happen with breasts. (At least not that I've heard of.)

We're all victims of our culture, which puts physical attributes front and center, but we all know, too, that lifetime relationships involve a whole lot more than that. So my advice to all my friends, women and men alike, is to forget about "that dick thing" and get on with the difficult business of being ourselves. It takes a lifetime to get it right, and, in the end, it's still pretty iffy.

Teach your children -- and maybe yourself -- how to shop for groceries.

I'm the person in my family who shops for grocieries, and I'm constantly amazed when I look into the cart behind mine in the check-out line and see nothing on sale: no two-for-one items, nothing with that extra label that says "Reduced for Quick Sale." I can't believe people just come into the grocery store and pay full price for things they could have gotten last week or next week or even this week at greatly discounted prices.

Fifteen dollars for those steaks? I bought the same package last week at half that price!

I think many of us don't teach our kids how to shop, and that may be because we, ourselves, don't know how to shop. My own grown children go into a grocery store and pick out what they want to eat and pay for it. End of deal.

But if I'd taught them -- and I blame myself -- how to shop for food, they could be saving many dollars on every trip.

And I'm not talking about coupons, which I never use.

I'm talking about looking over those colorful grocery store inserts in our newspapers every week and then walking the aisles, watching for bargains.

Just this week, a big store -- in your part of the country, it could be Safeway or King Soopers or whatever (probably not Whole Foods) -- advertised asparagus for 99 cents a pound. Hello? In
my part of the country -- out West -- asparagus is usually $3.99 a pound. I scanned the rest of the insert and saw that "country style ribs" were $1.49 a pound. These are the delicious, meaty ribs that you can cook for a few hours in a crockpot and that, with a little BBQ sauce, please everyone (except the odd vegetarian) in your family. Just a week before, they were $3.49 a pound. Did I stock up? Well, duh. (Tip: Buy a stand-alone freezer and put it in your garage.)

Every major grocery store runs specials every week. It's a law of (commercial) nature. They just do it. It's competition, the law of the market, the American way. BUT you have to be willing to read the newspaper inserts and/or walk the aisles. If you can't stand to be in a grocery store, then I'm not talking to you. Or if you only buy when you have to, as when your friends are coming over and you don't want to be bothered, go ahead and do what you have to do. That's emergency shopping. Not what most of us do. (I always remember Joan Rivers saying, "Does anyone pay retail?" She was talking about clothes, but the principle applies to groceries: You don't have to pay "retail".)

But if you are the one responsible for buying the groceries that feed your family, you really owe it to yourself to get smart about how to find the best prices. Like everything else these days, the costs of food are going up. Milk, potatoes, butter -- you name it. But every store, at one time or another, has deals that you can't pass up. I bought ten pounds of potatoes last week for $1.99.
Would my kids, shopping on their own, have paid more? Of course they would, if last week was when they wanted the potatoes: they were $3.19 for ten pounds then. (Of course that's assuming they know how to cook potatoes, which they probably don't but need to learn.)

I've often seen or heard about experiments when government/city officials try to feed a family of however many on a fixed amount for a week, and how they struggle to do it. But when I read detailed accounts, I see that they're paying the full amount for ground beef and other staples when all they had to do was check the newspaper inserts and/or walk the aisles of a few more stores and they would have found bargains galore! Every week something is on sale in some store of other! But you do have to put in the time. Is it worth it to you? It is to me.

And if you find it on sale -- something your family eats/drinks regularly -- buy a bunch of it. Store it wherever you can find the space. It's not going to go to waste.

Also, stay away from frozen entrees like Stouffer's unless they're two-for-one or half-price, as they often are. And if they are, buy several and stuff them into your freezer. You'll use them.

Recently I visited a grocery store, and upon leaving, the clerk at the register gave me my receipt, which was for $38.54, and she told me, "You saved $32.67." I'd saved almost half my entire cost! You can, too, with a little planning and some time on your part.

And you know what? If you get into it, grocery shopping is like bargain-hunting of any kind. If you love to to find name-band clothes marked-down at major stores, you could get into this kind of grocery-shopping. Hey, I recently found frozen shrimp rings-- perfect for parties -- at, you guessed it, two for one. It was just after Super Bowl Weekend.

Which raises this point: shop for values right after some kind of holiday. If you want to buy a turkey --which, cooked right, can serve your family for a week: leftovers and soups, etc. -- the
day or week after Thanksgiving or Christmas is your cue. Want a usually very expensive cut of corned beef? Check your local grocery store after March 17, St. Patrick's Day: they'll have lots of them that they bought and can't return and will be cutting the price to almost nothing. I buy several every year and put them in the freezer (even if I have to shove aside the Stouffer's).

I intend to be there this year, as I love a slow-cooked corned-beef brisket, simmered in the crockpot for a few hours and then put into the oven for an hour at 350 to brown it on top. And don't forget the cabbage, which will be selling for about 25 cents a pound and that you only want to add during the last hour of crockpot cooking. With leftovers, you can feed your whole family for very little that week. That cabbage you don't use, by the way, can be cooked in any number of ways, many very tasty.

We should teach our kids how to shop for groceries, but we may need to remind ourselves how to do it, too. Does it take time? Of course. But so does clipping coupons.

And, if you surrender to it, it's a great culinary adventure. Bon appetit!

Don't ever say, "It couldn't get any worse!"

It can. And you know it. I think there's someone's "law" that says that if things can go bad, they will. (That's pretty pessimistic but worth keeping in mind.)

I always heard as a kid that that the Chinese were reluctant to praise their children, as that kind of hubris might bring down the vengeance of the gods on their child.

The opposite applies, too. Don't complain too much about your situation, or you might invite some nasty god to smite you just to prove that you're a simple, silly human with no control over your own destiny. In short, "You think that's bad? Watch this!"

The point is that, however bad things are for you -- or for our nation or even the world -- it could most certainly get worse. And has. Many times before.

Those of us alive today do not remember World War One. (I think all those vets are dead.) But there was a time when people all over the world thought that WWI was as bad as it could get. All those young men, from so many different countries, dying in trenches far from home, getting cut to pieces by that wonderful new piece of military equipment, the machine gun, or having their lungs seared by another great demonic invention, mustard gas. Young boys died right and left, often horribly. And even after it was over, cities and even whole nations had to bind up their wounds.

I'm sure most of the world was saying, "It couldn't get any worse!"

Uh oh. Not a good thing to say. Those evil gods were listening.

Little more than twenty years later, Hitler came to power in Germany, and the carnage of that first world war was magnified many times. Not only were young men from even more countries
slaughtered, but entire cities were destroyed, whole populations -- the Jews, most notably --
targeted for absolute extinction. World War Two was so much worse than World War One that we almost don't even remember that first "war to end all wars".

It can always get worse.

I was reminded of this recently by the downturn in our national economy. So many of us had jobs that looked like a lock. We did our work and maybe even got praised for our efforts. We bought houses in nice neighborhoods and started families and looked forward to living the American Dream: work hard, and you'll be rewarded.

But then the banks who had loaned us the money to buy our houses started to fail. Apparently they'd also loaned to lots of others who couldn't afford those houses, just so they could put it on their books that they had that money, when they were really just hoping they did, hoping that all those people could keep up payments that "ballooned" after a certain period of time, becoming more than the bank had led them to believe they'd be paying every month.

Suddenly lots of people couldn't pay their mortgages, couldn't make that exploded payment. They started leaving their houses behind, to be taken over by the banks. But the banks weren't making any money from those re-possessed houses that no one could afford to buy, so they began to lose money. And once the bank starts to fail, to lose money, their loans to responsible people like you get to be suspect, too. If that bank goes bust, where is your loan? Who holds it?

It was a house of cards, and it collapsed, and lots of people couldn't afford their homes any more and had to sell or just leave. When the payments got to be more than they could afford, they realized that they'd been duped into deals they never should have signed.

So they lost our homes, and we thought: It couldn't get any worse than this.

And then came the lay-offs and the firings. Because the banks failed, so did lots of businesses.
We lost our jobs, so not only didn't we have a home, we had no income. We were very nearly on the street. And in some cases, we were.

On another end of the financial spectrum were those older folks who had put away dollars year after year, in investments, hoping to retire with enough to see them through the years when they wouldn't be earning anything. The stock market, where most of those investments were, started to tank a year or so ago, meaning that whatever those people thought they were worth was suddenly, and dramatically, a lot less. The market numbers dropped to record lows.

It can't get worse than this, they thought.

And then it got a lot worse. The market plummeted to levels it hadn't seen in decades. What a hundred thousand dollars was worth was now worth fifty thousand. And then even less.

Old folks had to think of getting part-time jobs, as greeters at WalMart, or worse.

We all were thinking that we'd seen the worst, that things couldn't get any worse, and then, of course, they did.

So what is the lesson from all this? How do you/we plan for the worst?

That's a tough one. We, as humans, are optimistic, always thinking that if we do things right, if we're moral and hard-working and honest, we'll succeed. And that's probably right. Most of the time. Maybe not now. (I still have my fingers crossed.)

But we should always keep an ear to the ground -- listening for the buffalo stampede coming our way -- aware that what we take for granted today could very well disappear tomorrow. That the future we have so neatly planned out could be gone with one wrong turn on a highway or one stupid investment or one night with the wrong person.

A couple of years ago, my younger brother died of a heart condition he'd had since childhood. He was the one who always looked after my mother, who was in her nineties. I thought this was the blow that would do her in. I dreaded going down there, back to my hometown. But while I was there, my older brother, who had cancer, also died, so not only did I end up writing two obits in a week but my mother lost two sons in that same time. I'm sure she thought, after my little bro died, "It can't get any worse!" And then her other son died. Less than a week later.

We're born into this life and do our best, but we shouldn't assume anything. The best usually happens over time, but the worst can happen in an instant. We have to be ready.

What does that mean? I think it means letting all your loved ones know who to call --even if
they don't know each other --in case something bad happens to you. Get everyone you love in touch with each other as soon as possible. Gie them all numbers they can dial right away. Get
the word out that something bad has happened, and it's time to rally the troops!

In the meantime, be smart. Think ahead. Put aside enough to see you through a crisis. Don't write that email today that you can write tomorrow. Keep your resume updated. Conserve.
Keep in touch with your loved ones, even those you don't like.

Save.

Yes, it can always get worse, but it you know that, you won't be blind-sided if/when it happens.

Good luck!

Going green is easy -- maybe too easy.

Ask yourself this question. Which is more important: human suffering or potential danger to our environment?

It's a question we all have to ask, in this time of financial crisis, when we have less money to donate to what we think are worthy causes.

Should we be sending our hard-earned money to causes that support "green" energy, or should we be supporting groups dedicated to relieving human misery in parts of the world that most of us will never visit?

Yes, we should all be cutting down, conserving, right? We should use less gas, which means driving less. Buy fewer packaged goods: cook from scratch. Recycle more of the bags we use and the newspapers we read. But we should have been doing that all along, a long time ago.

Waste not, want not. This isn't a new idea. It probably came from our parents, or their parents, survivors of The Great Depression, when every dollar and every commodity was precious. I suspect it came from their parents and grandparents, who settled this country and who used every resource they had, letting nothing go un-used.

This current crisis is nothing new, except for us. Our parents and grandparents saw it before. And they developed a very good financial strategy: Don't buy what you can't pay for.

Then came the time of easy credit, when you could put down almost nothing and buy almost anything you wanted, be it a car or a house or a snow-blower.

We were living large, way above our means, but then the crisis hit -- banks started to fail -- and we lost our jobs and our means to repay what we'd promised we'd repay. We lost our homes, too, not to mention our cars and snow-blowers.

As a result, many of us are in big trouble, having lost our jobs and maybe about to get kicked out of our houses.

At the same time, there is this constant talk about saving energy, preserving the forests, developing alternative sources of electricity -- wind, solar, even nuclear.

Whoa! Someone is putting the horse in front of the cart. Hello? We're in trouble here. Thinking about saving the environment is secondary to most of us, who are figuring out how to survive.

But things are even worse in other parts of the world, where whole populations of people in Africa and other places are being absolutely destroyed by tyrants and vigilante bands who decimate whole villages, raping and maiming and killing. I can guarantee you that saving engery is the last thing on their minds!

Should we really be so concerned about saving dollars on our utility bills when much of the world goes hungry or is attacked daily? Shouldn't our money and our star endorsements be going to help not just us who are about to lose our homes but to our fellow humans who have no homes to lose, or who have lost theirs not to banks but to thieves?

Are our lives worth more than theirs?

Imagine a woman whose husband has been murdered and who is now living in a tent with her kids, with no running water and a temperature above 100? And a guy with a gun comes to her and says he'll give her bread for her kids if she'll have sex with him? Or he doesn't ask and doesn't give her any bread but just has his way with her. Or a victim of torture who has no hospital to go to but is returned, on makeshift crutches, to his village, which doesn't exist anymore, to die alone in the ashes of what used to be his home?

And you're worried about whether solar panels on your roof might bring up the price of your house? You're proud of "going green"?

The environment is important, but I have to think that human suffering, anywhere in the world, is more important. A rising tide lifts all ships, someone once said. Lifting all the people on this earth to the same level of subsistence has to benefit us all, right? The fewer of us left in poverty, the more of us can dream of something better. The more hope we have, the less crime, the less desperation.

Global warming is a problem, for sure, but leaving most of the world's population in want and in danger is a much more immediate problem.

With all due respect to my liberal friends, we need to be sending our nation's resources to help the people of the world and worry about the environment later.



After all, the environment has been here longer than us and will be here long after we're gone. Whatever damage we do to it won't last. It will recover and go on as before, just as it does after earthquakes and fires and floods.

"No man is an island," wrote the poet John Dunne.

I think human suffering trumps the environment any day.

Heaven is not likely to be what we think/hope it is.

Let's assume that we survive death and go on, as souls, to another existence. That's a big assumption that is hard to swallow, but it seems to be built into the human brain. The very oldest of our societies, once they moved from random peoples wandering around the landscape, looking for something to kill and eat, to tribes who grew crops and then to societies, have all acknowledged this desire to live again in another realm beyond our imagining.

So there must be something to it, at least from our human point of view.

But what does that ultra-existence look like?

Usually it involves being re-connected with our loved ones here on earth, but you can see right off that we have problems. What if you don't want to see those people again -- certainly not for all of eternity? You want to spend endless years with the husband or wife you divorced or even that obnoxious uncle or aunt? This part of the idea of heaven just doesn't work unless you get to choose the people you want to meet in heaven.

But that brings up a different problem: What if someone else's view of heaven involves re-uniting with you, but you don't want to re-unite with that person? What if all those relatives are waiting for you in heaven, and the last thing you want to do is show up at that eternal reunion?

Does your heaven overlap with mine? How would that work? It wouldn't, right?

So is it possible that you can exist in another world and interact with anyone you choose but avoid interacting with those who see you as part of their heaven? Sounds complicated, no?

And what does your disposal have to do with it? If you're sent off in style, with a grandiose funeral, replete with spoken remembrances from not just your left-behind relatives but, if you were an "important" person, tributes from dignitaries, does that somehow assure your place in heaven ahead of those millions of nameless people who didn't have proper burials but were shoveled into graves during this or that war?

Are you beginning to see that the logistics are mind-boggling?

We don't have a clue what happens to us once we die. The various religions tell us this or that, but they're all just guessing. And they all have their own versions of heaven, which, again, is just guessing. Hoping.

I still like the idea that we come back in another life, having learned something from our previous lives, but that, too, is just hoping and guessing. I have not one clue that it's real.

What I'm trying to say is that we can't, as humans, imagine an afterlife, a heaven.

The best minds have not solved even the most basic of questions: Why are we here? How did we get here? Where are we going? What's it all about?

But let's jump to the end: You or I die. Everyone mourns. We get a memorial or a stone or, if we're lucky, a poem to remember us. But we're dead. It's all over for us. No more you or me.

However we're disposed of, we'll end up as bones and eventually dust. In other words, in the end, our physical self will be nothing, whether we've been depositied in a box or a crypt or just a ditch (along with lots of other nameless dead people).

So then what?

That's what we don't know. We can only guess. And hope. We just can't believe that the unique person you and I were is suddenly "disappeared": nowhere to be found. Gone. Forever.

That, of course, is why we invented the idea of heaven. (Hell, too, but I don't buy that: no way can you torture humans forever for mistakes they made as stupid humans. Uh uh. Sorry.)

I have to come back to the mystery of it all, which I embrace. I love the notion that I don't understand how all "this" works. It obviously started from something -- which I don't pretend to understand -- and continues in a way that seems to go on despite us (astronomy, geology, physics, etc.) -- but here we are, an intelligent species, able to think about all those puzzles, and we still can't figure it all out.

But we keep trying.

We try to understand how the universe works and how human emotions work and how math works and how the brain does what it does, to let all this thinking take place at all, but, in the end, we're overwhelmed by the sheer perplexity of it all.

And don't you just love it? I do.

This is what heaven's all about: we don't have a clue, we humans here on earth, but maybe in some other existence beyond this one, we will. God will tell us what it was all about. And we'll be so happy in that knowledge that we'll forget all our human concerns and just live the afterlife in total bliss.

Whoa! No sex? No booze? No poetry? No good movies? No lobster with drawn butter?

See what I mean? We're humans: We can't imagine pleasure beyond what we've known.

Hey, see you in heaven! Be sure to look me up, okay?

(Just check my DO NOT CONTACT list first. Saint Peter has it.)

Men organize; women clean.

I will put my garage up against my wife's closet any day.

My garage is organized to the last peg on that pegboard holding my drill or my saw or my duct tape. Every item in its place, displayed so that I can find it and use it any time I need it.

My wife's closet, on the other hand, is something I couldn't live with. Clothes hung up willy-nilly, as the old expression goes, shoes all over the floor, stuff everywhere.

But when my wife says we have guests coming and the house needs to be cleaned, I'm in a panic.

Cleaned?

Being a guy, I know what that means. Every surface scrubbed -- not just wiped off-- and every nook and cranny in the kitchen and the bathrooms scoured with something like a toothbrush.

God, it's like being in the army all over again, when the notice of a general coming to inspect our quarters generated all kinds of non-guy hysteria: everything had to be not just packed away but sanitized, with bleach if necessary, with steel wool if you were on kitchen duty, with paint if you were in charge of rusted vehicles in the the auto pool. In other words, just this once, when someone is visiting, everything has to look like no one's ever lived here.

So the general arrives -- or the guests arrive -- and everything is perfect. He gives his okay and moves on. Your guests say how nice it was, and they move on.

And your house does look really good, almost ready to sell.

And the two of you, husband and wife, are exhausted from the effort and maybe at one another's throats. Why didn't you do this or that? Why didn't YOU do this or that?

Take a break. It's just the difference between men and women --once again.

Men organize; women clean.

When guests are coming, it's almost always up to the wife to be sure that everything looks good for them. The good china is out -- did the husband even know they had good china? The whole house has been dusted -- did the husband even know that things needed to be dusted? The nice wine glasses are on the table -- did the husband know that there were nice wine glasses? Where are they kept? Oh, maybe in that glass-fronted cabinet he dares not go near.

Men organize; women clean.

The man of the house can usually point to the garage as evidence that he's doing his share, trying to keep things organized: all the tools and hoses and such that keep the house functional. He's proud of his organization. Everything within reach. Need a wrench? There it is. Pliers? Right up there. Duct tape? In front of your eyes. Black electrical tape, too.

Men like to keep things where they can find them. Women tend to want things looking nice.

Which means -- and I'm stretching here --that women's personal space is often messier than men's. A typical woman's closet is probably not as well organized as a man's, and certainly not as well-organized as a man's garage. I suspect that most women dump lots of stuf into their closets that they expect to wear someday but may not, depending on circumstances, so that their closets probably get littered with lots more shoes, etc., than their male counterparts' closets do. Most guys, after all, have some shoes and some shirts and pants and don't worrry much about how to match them to each other, which makes it easier to put them away. I can't imagine what goes through a woman's mind as she confronts her fashion choices.

But turn a woman loose on a man's bathroom, and all hell breaks loose. This can be a wife or a woman hired to clean once a week. The complaints can be heard a block away. Stains in the toilet and on the tile floor, hair in the shower drain, soap on the mirror, etc. Or as the guys hears it: blah blah blah. Hey, just clean it, okay? Or don't. It's no big deal to me. I can live with it.

And that, of course, is the point. Guys aren't concerned about things being clean. We just want things to be organized. We want to be able to reach for this or that and find it there. Women are just the opposite. They want things to look nice and smell nice and be presentable to company.
My closet may be chaotic, they might say, but my kitchen and my bathroom need to be spotless. What will my women friends think when they come to visit?

It's a wonder at least half our marriages survive. I guess we all learn to compromise, no?

Is it that love triumphs or that convenience, in the end, rules?

Your guess is as good as mine.