Anna's Bloviations

A Darwinian Realization... Nineteen years and a few months' ago today, alarm bells should have gone off when I was informed I would need a cesarean to deliver my first baby. Not one century before, I would have died under similar circumstances and that would have been that. Evolution would have weeded out this Twiggy-woman with hips too narrow for a nine-pound baby to pass through. But modern medicine allowed me not only to corrupt the gene-pool with this evolutionarily undesirable trait, it allowed me to procreate further and have a second child by the same means. But let's back up further for a moment before I get to my main point. Were it frankly not for an unprecedented economy here in the States, one that allowed this insatiably hungry Twiggy to never have to go more than a couple of hours at a stretch without food, well I probably never would have gotten to the stage of considering a caesarian. I'd be dead of starvation -- an inefficient energy machine in need of much more fuel than realistically available except in exceptionally gluttonous times. One less liberal the pebble in some poor repressed conservative's shoe.

But there is a third thing that makes me a Darwinian disaster and which brings me to my point. Except when hubby spends thousands of dollars to bring me to one of the few remaining sanctuaries of the world -- one either untouched by man or one that has found a unique and charming harmony between man and nature, I for the most part feel AESTHETICALLY ASSAULTED by my surroundings on a daily basis. Everyday I tense physically and mentally from the ugly gashes and scars mankind leaves in its wake. Asphalted gnarls of roadway, jutting angles of cheaply constructed buildings, chain-link fences, grimy subways and yawning strip malls assail my sensibilities. Then there is the fact that mankind has been around for so many thousands' of years only to be bashing one another's heads in like never before. This saps enormous energy in terms of being able to remain positive and hopeful about our future.

I am not seeking sympathy. Rather I am presenting a hard-cold fact. The thousands' of years of genetic programming that whisper through my DNA are just not those that look likely to successfully survive this world I already feel eerily alien to. Too bad for me but perhaps great for someone else whose genetic gusto is best suited to adapt to this new 21st century landscape. Just as the computer was able to ideally channel the talents of individuals otherwise lost in a world of paper and pen, so will the eco-challenged world be an optimum environment for certain individuals whose abilities are not dependent upon, or influenced by, requisite conditions to their physical surroundings.

Luck, I suppose, will be the determining factor as to whether I will have the fortune in my old age to afford an environment that is conducive to my aesthetic needs. If not then please just give me a f****** gun before I am subjected to an illiterate staff person spoon-feeding me mashed peas in a nursing home sandwiched between a gas station and a convenience store. That's not living. That's sustaining. Something I am not genetically programmed to do. But who knows. A year-and-a-half ago I never would have predicted that I would be where I am. Life is mysterious. Perhaps I am genetically coded in such a way that aesthetic sensibilities will suddenly melt away and become unimportant. Reading to grandchildren or caring for an elderly parent become the all-consuming drivers of one's existence. I do, however, know one thing. No amount of external danger, be they terrorists, Patriot Acts, or home-grown neo-conservative activism will ever keep me from going where I want to go, when I want to go, or doing what I want to do, when I want to do it. So she said at a sassy forty-four....