I Will Go Fly a Kite!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180
degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together.
Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a
topological form with some amazing characteristics.
For one thing, you will find that simple twist has
transformed your paper from a two-sided strip
into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't
want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side.
But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different
angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

__________________________________________________________________
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I am perhaps the least athletic person on the planet. And the most sedentary. I am an adherent of the Oscar Levant School of physical exercise. That famous pianist/raconteur once quipped that for exercise, he would “get up out of bed, stagger, then fall into a coma.” And I may not be even quite that energetic.

School gym classes were always pure torture for me. I never could perform at even mediocre levels in any sport. So I spent those class periods trying desperately to get to the end of the line, trying desperately to avoid taking my turn at bat. My fondest hope was that I could remain a benchwarmer.

But recently I saw these kites for sale in the grocery store. They were in a rack in the “seasonal” aisle in springtime. There was such a large, appealing selection of them. There were giant owl eyes and eagles and colorful geometric designs. I considered. It probably would be good to heed some of the medical advice being poured our way every day about staying active. Besides, kite-flying struck me as the kind of “sport” I could really endorse. It is nonviolent, non-competitive, certainly more my speed than the basketball or baseball games I was called on to try, and try, and try again in high school gym. Flying a kite can be like becoming part of a ballet with the wind – graceful, sublime.

So after riffling through the store’s assortment for a while, I finally chose the owl kite. It’s big brown eyes, looking down, didn’t seem threatening. The owl had a sort of benign, protective expression. It would almost be like having a guardian angel up there, hovering in goofy raptness over me. I took it off the rack and went to the check-out counter, ready to join the ranks of the physically active.

A lot of people in Chicago go down to the lakefront to fly kites. But I was scheduled to meet my friends for one of our semi-annual get-togethers in Canada soon, at “our” place in Ontario. Different Country; different Lake.

Our place is on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie. It is wonderfully windy there, an ideal spot for flying kites. Shirts hung on our clothesline furl out into the friendliest, most welcoming of arms. They wave with ceaseless good cheer to the fishermen far out on the rolling waters of Erie. Those fishermen, in their picturesque trawlers, must enjoy spotting our landlubber greeting through their binoculars sometimes. Usually three boats at a time make their way in solemn procession out from the Harbor every day, across the horizon, so early, often just past midnight. They stay fishing until early morning, their running lights twinkling through the night. They look like such fragile representatives of life, out there on the rough waters. Then when the boats have met their quotas, they trail back to shore to unload their day’s catch at the various fisheries on the town wharf. Yes, I’m sure the fishermen must sometimes enjoy seeing our dancing shirts and pants, waving, kickin’ it. It’s an earnest chorus line, if not quite as perfectly synchronized a one as the Rockettes.

Sometimes the shirts have oil rig workers to wave at as well. I’m not sure about the mechanics of the drilling, but oil rigs will appear temporarily out in Lake Erie. At night, a rig looks like a gleaming tiara floating out on the water. It’s an enchanting sight, belying the dangerous, polluting work that is going on beneath that bejeweled topside.

But day or night, there is usually wind at our place – or at least a bracing breeze. Our area has been designated one of the windiest stretches in Canada. It’s a natural for windmills. Many municipalities in the Province have subsidized the building of wind farms, or even private installations of single windmills. However our particular municipality has gotten bogged down in red tape and bureaucratic argumentation over the matter. Our neighbors in Ontario have a ninety-foot windmill trestle ready to go up on their lawn. But they haven’t been able to get governmental permission to proceed with setting up this alternative energy source. There’s some fear that a ninety-foot tower might pose a threat to neighbors - such as myself.

I’m not sure why the windmill trestle has to be as tall as ninety feet. The man who sold our neighbors this tower, talked about “laminar flow” and the need to clear air turbulence currents from trees. But even a little decorative lawn windmill will keep spinning at a giddy pace in these parts. I get the feeling you could run a TV, maybe even a dishwasher, off of one of those pieces of lawn kitsch. So why the need for a full ninety-feet of scaffolding to take advantage of the wind? I don’t know. And our neighbors are getting frustrated, with the pieces of that so-far languishing trestle sitting bundled besides their porch.

Meanwhile, the wind keeps blowing, going to waste. But I was going to put it to use flying the kite I was bringing. We planned the coming Sunday for our venture back into childhood. The weatherman predicted a clear and breezy day. And we would all be together then to “go fly a kite.”

I had trouble sleeping the night before this big event though. I felt I might have been altogether too ambitious in this leap into physical activity. I had heard it could take quite some ingenuity to get a kite launched aloft. You have to snap your wrist just right in order to get the kite cast aloft. You have to orient yourself into the wind just right, and feed out the string at just the right rate. It was like fly fishing – only up into the air not down into a stream. There was an art to it. And I was afraid that here again, I would prove to be totally unequal to the task. I would never be able to get my kite up. I’d be as embarrassed as an old man at an orgy – caught short without his Viagra.

As I started to doze off into fitful sleep, other downsides to this precipitous venture loomed up out of the dark at me. Didn’t you have to run fairly fast in order to get the wind to catch the sail of the kite? I pictured myself tearing across the lawn. Watch out! A gopher hole! I pictured myself falling, breaking an ankle. They shoot wusses, don’t they? Or worse yet, I pictured myself hurtling pell-mell off the side of the bluff – rolling, falling, falling, hitting concussively on the rocks below. Oh, why had I chosen such a dangerous sport to inaugurate my more active lifestyle?

The next day after a late lunch, I blearily wished my friends might have forgotten about our venture. But woe betide – they hadn’t. “Kite time!” Ed proclaimed. He unwrapped the owl face from its plastic, pulled out the placard of twine at the ready, and handed the ensemble to me. “Here, it’s your kite. You do the honors. You start,” he knelled.

It plummeted me back into those bygone gym classes, desperately wanting to wedge myself away from the action to the end of the line again. I considered assuming a tone of generous deferral. I considered insisting that he should do the honors of launching the kite. But that would just be delaying the inevitable. It would be prolonging my anxiety. There was nothing for it but to brave this out. With my teeth clenched harder than anyone could possibly suspect, I held the kite to my bosom and stepped out of our French doors into the firing squad brightness of the arena of our back yard.

But an amazing thing happened. The moment I stepped out of those French doors, I felt a tugging at my chest - a gentle, but insistent beguiling. The breeze was taking the kite. It pulled it out of my hands and up and away. I quickly fed some twine – then some more twine. The kite was already over our chimney top, joyously released into the heavens. The owl was bobbing and weaving, ogling down at me. But its big, limpid eyes were getting smaller and smaller as the kite receded ever upward.

“Hurrah! You got it up!” my friends cheered from the back porch. I don’t think they realized how easy it had been.

I leisurely walked from one side of our half-acre to the other. The wind did all the work. I just had to be there beside. It was like walking an old dog on a leash, except my dog was up, not down. I strolled our property, master of all I surveyed. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes, I relinquished the twine to Ed. He did likewise. Then Sandy took her turn. We each walked the kite around our lawn. Since we hadn’t planted any trees yet, and since there were no wind mills allowed - there were no vertical structures we had to avoid. The kite could dance where it pleased.

After a while, Ed brought out some lawn chairs and we sat, passing the tag-end of string from one to the other. Then Sandy brought out a pitcher of sun tea. The one who had the kite at the moment would tie the twine around a finger, and proceed to sip iced tea from the glass in the other hand. Finally even that much involvement became a little too arduous. And we tied the end of the string around an arm of one of our lawn chairs.

And so we let the afternoon pass into dusk – sitting and sipping and flying a kite. Not much happened. Oh, a seagull swooped across the sky and seemed likely to collide with the kite. But at the last moment, it espied this UFO in its path and made a sharp right angle avoidance of it. We laughed. We had never seen a gull make a maneuver like that.

It was going to be a full moon that night. My friends and I often made a celebration of the rising of the moon when we were here. Since we had been out in the yard so long, we decided we might as well just sit on longer and let the day’s kite-flying blend into our night’s moon observation. And so we continued to sit and sip and chat – and the owl became a night owl, high up, watching over us. We couldn’t see it any longer in the dark, but we could feel its presence if we touched a finger to the string extended up from the lawn chair. We could feel the wind’s vibration along the lead. We knew it was still flying.

Then the moon rose up out of the water. It unfurled that breathtaking silver-gleaming carpet across the lapping waters, from moon to the base of our cliff. Oh, to walk that enchanted path!

And as the moon rose, I felt a corresponding beam of triumph rise secretly across my face. At last, I was succeeding at a sport! At last, I could feel that surge of self-confidence. “Yes,” I whispered to myself. “I can do this!”

Outside Graceland, Looking In

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn
(180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together.
Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is
a topological form
with some amazing
characteristics.
For one thing, you will find that
simple twist has
transformed your paper from
a two-sided strip into a
continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures...

__________________________________________________________________

A documentary called Elvis, That’s the Way It Is just aired on Chicago TV. It was a collection of interviews and rehearsal scenes with Elvis at the peak of his comeback career in 1970. I watched the movie and was reminded of my one brush with anything personally pertaining to Elvis.

I went to Memphis in the late 80’s. I was traveling alone by bus, stopping at various cities, hitting them pretty much cold just to see what adventures would unfold. When I got to Memphis, I found it was ALL about Elvis. I had heard of Beale Street and the blues and W. C. Handy. But all those notable Memphis people and places were eclipsed by the legend of the beloved rock-and-roll singer. Memphis was essentially a one-industry town. And that industry was Elvis.

I remarked on this monopoly to a friendly cabdriver who seemed in the mood to chat. “Oh yes,” the young African-American smiled. “This is Elvis’ town. Well, he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but everything important after that – he did here. And I imagine, when the time comes, he will die here,” the cabby predicted.

I chuckled. I thought he was joking, making mocking reference to the clinging belief of some simpler souls that Elvis was still alive, to be seen frequenting the local Burger Kings. The cabby had seemed so levelheaded up to now. But I caught the severe look he bounced back at me from his rear-view mirror. And I realized - he was serious. He was one of those who believed.

He had seen me chuckle. “Oh, so you fell for those reports that he died,” the young driver spoke sharply to me. “Well, if you would do your homework, you’d see it couldn’t be so. Did you read the autopsy report on Elvis – I mean read it carefully?”

I sheepishly admitted I hadn’t read that document at all. It seems everyone has his own opinion about what you need to know before you can call yourself an educated person. One acquaintance of mine has been insisting for years that I read The Mind Game, a psychology book that analyses people’s motives. Another acquaintance has told me I MUST read Middlemarch, the George Eliot classic. And I intend to read both those works – really I do. I have had Middlemarch waiting on my bedside table for years, in a deluxe Everyman edition – waiting for that perfect night when I’m not too tired or not too wired to launch into it and do it justice. Now another item was being added to my “must read” list. It seemed I couldn’t lay claim to being an informed citizen until I had studied Elvis’ autopsy report.

“You read it,” the cabdriver was pressing his case. “You’ll see I’m right. Look at the top of the report. It says it is the autopsy for ‘Elvis Aron Presley.’ There’s only one ‘a’ in Aron. Only one ‘a!’ Now it’s true they spelled his middle name that way on his birth certificate. But that was a mistake. And he corrected the mistake as soon as he had a chance. He changed it to the correct spelling – to ‘Aaron’ with two ‘A’s.’ Everyone here knew it was two ‘A’s.’ So, when the autopsy report refers to an ‘Elvis Aron Presley’ with only one ‘A’ – you know that’s their way of telling you it’s not the real Elvis who was buried. You just have to see what’s right before your eyes. Somebody else was buried in his place. Probably Elvis just needed to take a break. But you mark my words – he’ll be back!”

Properly chastened for my foolishness at believing all the premature newspaper accounts of Elvis’ death, I thanked the driver, paid him, and got out to continue my explorations of Memphis on what I hoped would be a more even keel. I eventually signed up for a GreyLine tour of the City. I had a choice of several tours, ranging from a “full-package tour,” to a more abbreviated overview. Since I had already done considerable “Walkin’ in Memphis” on my own, I decided to save money and just go for the latter. All I needed was to touch on a few more highlights.

But the bus tour proved to be a further celebration of nothing but Elvis. We made short work of the likes of Beale Street and St. Jude’s Hospital. Then on to the real importance of Memphis, to its place in history as the cradle of Elvis’ singing career. We lingered in front of the Sun Studio, the small, squeezed storefront where Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins – and Elvis – had made their first major recordings. Our tour guide next drove us to a large, gray block of a building. He pointed to a second-story balcony and informed us that that was the balcony of the public housing apartment where the Presleys had lived for several years after coming to Memphis. They had been receiving Public Aid. However, we were cautioned not to take the lawn chair that was out on the balcony as a real Elvis artifact. Our bus driver announced through the microphone that the chair had been brought there by the current residents of that apartment.

Then on to the Heartbreak Hotel, and the lot where Elvis had likely bought his first pick-up truck, and the place where the Presley family had probably done their laundry during those first lean years. I had always liked Elvis, but really, I thought this magnification of the minutia of his life was a bit much.

Finally though, we came to the pièce de résistance of the tour. We pulled up in front of Graceland. And this was one aspect of Elvis’ life I really was interested in touring. Pictures I’d seen of the interior had led me to believe it was a place of ostentatious kitsch throughout - not a décor I would have chosen for myself. But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe there were private wings in there that were more cozy and relaxed. I wanted to get a first-hand feel of the place.

We all eagerly disgorged from the bus and assembled in front of that famous wrought iron gate with its large black musical notes. Our driver contacted a groundskeeper on his walkie-talkie, and the gates were swung open. We started to file through. But wait! Something was wrong. A large beefy hand levered up in front of me, blocking my progress.

“Not you!” the driver forbade. “Your ticket is just for the short tour. You have to stay outside!”

What? I started to stammer some protest, but it was true – I had just bought the “short tour.”

There was a handsome Australian couple along for this round of sightseeing. I had already crossed paths with them several times. We’d become friendly. I’d asked if they were newlyweds. They were so friendly and alive to each other. They laughed and said, “No, we’ve been married twenty-five years.” The husband was a policeman assigned to patrol the outback around Adelaide, Australia. This was their first big vacation in years. They had been looking forward to Memphis because the wife idolized Elvis. She told me that as a teenager, she had taped a large poster of Elvis to the ceiling over her bed. I thought this was a bit of a racy revelation to make in front of her husband. But he took it in good part. He didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t been his wife’s first choice as a bed partner.

Now this indulgent Crocodile Dundee went to bat for me. He tried to cajole the bus driver into letting me pass. “The brochure doesn’t make it clear. It sounds as if an inside tour of Graceland is included.”

But the driver was adamant. “She’s only paid for the short tour,” he played trump again. “You have to stay out here,” he turned his stern repulse on me. And that was that.

The others filed through to see Graceland, the Promised Land. I had come so far, past rickety lawn chairs and Laundromats – but I was not to be with my comrades for the final ascent to the top of the Elvis experience. I was the only one on the bus who had been too stingy to sign up for the extended tour. Each tourist in turn looked with commiseration, with pity on me as he/she was ushered on to the highpoint of this expedition. But for all their looks of regretful sympathy, I noticed that they gave me a wide berth as they trekked by. Most of them had not heard why I was being excluded. So they could only surmise that I was somehow one of the great unwashed, someone not anointed for admission to the inner sanctum. So they charily filed past me, and I was left, a leper, alone on the sidewalk. The gates clanged shut – me on one side; my bus mates on the other side of those musical notes.

I watched the tail of their procession move down the long driveway and disappear inside the mansion. How should I pass the time? We’d been told that a sweep had recently been made of the mansion’s gate and immediate surroundings. Groundskeepers had removed the accumulation of love notes and pictures that were daily attached and strewn nearby. But already some more avowals of undying devotion had been stuck in place. I occupied myself reading one cri de coeur after another. “Elvis - Love you Forever!” said one post-it note staked on the gate. “I (heart) Elvis” was chalked on the sidewalk by my feet.

I knew I would probably never get back to Memphis. I pressed close to the gate, looking wistfully through to the private Graceland – the Graceland that I would never see.

And I thought – back in the day, was it possible that Elvis sometimes looked wistfully out his window at this public sidewalk – the sidewalk where he could never stand?

Retaining Water

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures...

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I have been reading a very good book entitled Garbage Land: The Secret Trail of Trash by Elizabeth Royte. And I find it ties in with my previous blog post about the fad for carrying bottles of water everywhere. I lampooned this water-drinking craze. Now I find my sarcasm was even more apt than I suspected.

In her book, Elizabeth Royte cites the fact that half-liter water bottles comprise an ever-increasing part of our garbage. A high percentage of these bottles never get recycled. They are choking our landfills, floating in our waterways, popping up and bobbing up all over the landscape. They have become the quintessential plastic menace. Like most plastic, they have the power of persistence. They will out-live us all. Maybe it will be them, and not cockroaches, that rise to rule the post-nuclear world. It is easy to conjure nightmares about these bottles - silently, stealthily massing into armies, marching on, conquering one city after another. And it will be hard to draw a bead on these things. Since most of them are transparent, they can easily take on the coloration of their surroundings. They have ready-made camouflage.

At any rate, after reading Royte's statistics on this growing component of our bulk of garbage, I felt quite self-congratulatory. I can give myself credit for not contributing to this pile of refuse. It's one more instance where I earn points on the cheap - simply by NOT doing something. In this case, I am helping the ecology simply by NOT feeling the need to drink water at frequent intervals. It's almost as easy a gig as saving the environment by staying home and watching TV. I'm not a couch potato. I'm an earnest environmentalist, dedicated to staying out of my car, off the highways, away from gas pumps.

But then in another section of Royte's book, I learned that I am also saving the environment by something I am actively doing. I hadn't even realized it. Royte tells how thousands of pigs used to roam through the streets of New York during the 1800s. People commonly kept pigs in their back yards then. Many of these pigs would inevitably escape, multiply, and run wild among the human denizens of the Big Apple. Royte says as many as 100,000 pigs ranged around Manhattan at one time. I can't help but question that figure a little. I don't recall seeing any pigs in Edward Steichen's photographs of New York during that era. I don't recall seeing any pig in any 19th century picture of New York. Still, I'm prepared to accept the fact that there were a lot of pigs somewhere on the scene in those days, even if their numbers may not quite have run into the tens of thousands. And these pigs served a real purpose. Before garbage pickup service was instituted in the City, people would chuck their offal out the windows. And the pigs were there to dispose of it. They "converted waste into edible protein."

Of course, the pigs generated their own waste. Their manure was added to the piles left by horses. When a serious cholera epidemic broke out in New York in the mid-1800s, it was the pigs who were largely blamed. Government officials started to designate one city section after another as "pig-free zones." It became illegal to keep pigs in these areas. By the late 1890s, pigs had been banned altogether. And people had to start relying on human garbage collectors to pick up their refuse.

Reading all this, I began to see how I have actually been doing my bit to return my city to that more cost-effective mode of garbage collection. It all started when I began to see the occasional possum scuttle through my yard at night. I was thrilled to witness this wildlife. I encouraged the visitations by putting out tidbits of food. Over the course of a year or so, I began to attract several possums and a number of raccoons. Now my garden is a virtual nature preserve. Me and the possums and the raccoons and the squirrels and the birds and my cat are all getting along famously. I don't need to go on expensive safaris, or on rural retreats to see wildlife. It comes to me.

People hardly believe I can entertain such wildlife guests, here in a heavily trafficked section of Chicago. But it's true. I have the pictures to prove it. And as a bonus of these visitations, I get a lot of my garbage automatically processed. I have been able to forget about occupying myself with any touchy, elaborate composting procedures. I can just put out my scraps, my slightly over-the-hill bananas, my brownish apples, etc., etc., mix in some legitimate wildlife chow - and have it all gone by morning, turned into more wildlife-viewing opportunity.

It's true that my possums and raccoons don't quite serve the same extent of function the pigs of New York served. Those pigs were eventually eaten. I hardly could contemplate such a fate for my wildlife visitors. (Although several southern-born acquaintances of mine chuckle that they have some good possum pie recipes at the ready, passed down to them from their mothers - should I ever change my mind.)

But no. I'm just gloating over this easy recycling operation I have built from the ground up. On the one hand, I'm not contributing to the blight of plastic, simply by not having jumped on the water drinking bandwagon. And on the other hand, I am positively fostering a nothing-goes-to-waste cycle of use, with my wildlife collaborators. I really am very environmentally correct. I really am a very good person.

Water, Water Everywhere

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures...



Watching all the airline passengers divesting themselves of their water bottles and sports drinks before boarding the airplanes this week - brought an old annoyance of mine to mind. When did people get so thirsty? When did they start feeling the need to carry liquid around everywhere they go? It's as if everyone just finished running the hundred-yard-dash under a broiling sun. Whereas in actuality, most of these people probably were like me - pretty sedentary during the last twelve hours. And I know I haven't felt the urge to drink any water. I would have to force myself. And hedonist that I am, I rarely force myself to do anything.

I know my grandparents never felt the need to carry water with them. The idea of being accoutred with a constant Perrier would have struck them as ludicrous. Imagine some of the famous works of art of the last century. Think of Seurat's pointillist painting, "An Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte. Or think of the big Caillebotte scene that welcomes you from a prominent spot in Chicago's Art Institute. The picture is officially called "Paris Street, Rainy Weather" and shows a Victorian couple in the foreground, walking comfortably along the Boulevard under their umbrellas. Those are dignified, compelling people. They certainly look healthy. But not one of them is armed with a bottle of water in a holster. Not one of them is seen drawing and swigging. Imagine how those enchanting scenes would be turned to farce if the women were shown toting flasks of water incidentally augmenting their bustles. Imagine how comically insufficient the men would appear if the bulge in their trousers was always some bottle of Gatorade.

No, our grandparents didn't feel the need to attach that extra appendage wherever they went. And more basically, I don't believe the thought of carrying water around would ever even have occurred to them. The medical books of those days were also filled with advice about drinking plenty of water. But no one would have translated that advice into an injunction to stop and sip some expensive bottled liquid every ten yards or so. And I doubt that human physiology has changed all that much in the last one hundred years that our bodies now demand a steady intake.

Although I suppose I shouldn't rule out the possibility that a large percentage of members of the species homo Americanus has evolved into a state of dire thirst in recent decades. After all, it has been shown that in some instances, evolution can proceed in rapid, discernible leaps. For example, consider the finches on the Galapagos Islands - Darwin's Finches. Several books have been published recently telling how the beaks of those finches can change markedly in the course of just a generation or two - depending on what sorts of seeds become most abundant on the Island. A preponderance of thick-hulled, solid seed pods drive the finches to develop stout, short beaks capable of jack-hammering through those carapaces. More delicate bivalve-like pods drive the finches to develop longer, pointier beaks, capable of prying open the pods - in lieu of the finches being provided with those fancy little tools you get in posh French restaurants to open mussel shells. So yes, evolution might have wrought a similar quick change in human physiology.

Perhaps so many people have evolved the need to sip water at frequent intervals because they are being primed to accept an inevitable status as diabetics. Knowing they soon will be perpetually thirsty, nature is driving them to acquire the habit of hydrating themselves early and often.

Or maybe it's all a status thing. People sling bottles of waterslung from their hips in order that we can recognize them as the "right sort" of people - the sort of people who are properly health conscious. Whereas once, during Prohibition, a lot of people had a hip-flask of gin strapped to their thighs as a symbol of their rebellion against government edicts - now people carry bottles of water as a symbol of their commitment to "taking care of themselves."

Maybe that's why we now experience the constant delay of people stopping to sip from their water bottles. It's everywhere. I rented a DVD of comedian Sarah Silverman's stand-up performance the other night. And bottled water was featured as a necessary adjunct to her going on-stage. Yes, some speakers of old used to have a pitcher of water on the lectern with them. But they only had recourse to pouring a little from it once or twice in the course of an evening - at most. However Sarah Silverman imposed those caesuras of sipping on her performance after every other joke. She unscrewed her bottle of water and drank. It was part of the rhythm of her presentation. It was a pause, a placeholder. And it let us know that she was aware.

And as goes Sarah Silverman, so go all the others. There they are - all the people on their way to work, with a bottle of water in accompaniment. All the people out jogging, or just walking a little briskly, with a bottle of water sloshing along. And then all those people at the airports, having to leave their bottles of life-giving fluid in dumpsters before boarding - just in case one of those bottles should have turned out to be something other than mountain spring dew distilled after all.

But me personally, I don't really think this recent need so many feel to be accompanied by water is due to some evolutionary change. And I don't think it is a display of status either. I personally think there is a much more sinister reason behind all the compulsory bottles. I think it is a sign of the aliens among us. I think it is the invasion of the body snatchers become fact. So many have already been taken over. Their instructions are there in the bottles of water. Every time they hoist a Perrier to their lips and let the fluid enter them - they are steeping their brains in a little more of the alien juice. They are allowing themselves to be transformed. They are transforming.

There aren't many of us left who haven't received our instructions. These bottles of influence are everywhere. They want to make us all carry one of those bottles. Watch out! THEY'RE COMING...!