A Most Eccentric Post

Last week I learned that the Earth’s mass never changes, that all the mass that once was, still is. Probably I was supposed to memorize this fact back in grade school but I’m quite certain no one ever told it to me. I also think I was out sick the day they taught us how to use fractions but that’s a tale for another time. Now, if I was intelligent and just learned that the Earth’s mass never changes, I might begin to wonder about topics like reincarnation or molecular evolution.

But instead, maybe a pair of Hitler’s dress shoes got separated from each other in a grand explosion at the end of World War II. Maybe one shoe wound up in the Spree River in East Berlin and the other under a pile of rocks and rubble. Suppose the rubble shoe would break into pieces or be burned in a fire and that dirt and ash would live underneath the foundation of a large office building on the outskirts of town, probably run today by a heavyset fraulein hell-bent on finding out who’s switching the name labels on the lunches in the community kitchen. The river shoe might drift all the way to the Czech Republic, be sliced to pieces by a boat propeller, and some bit of the patent leather would be eaten by a big, grey fish with sharp teeth. Eventually the shoe leather would leave the scary fish in the form of a fertilizing pellet that would drift to the bottom of the river and someday sprout some form of mutant algae.

Maybe that algae would be scraped up, preserved, and shipped to Thailand, to a spa in Pattaya that specializes in the Eastern European Algae Wrap. And maybe some of that Hitler algae would be smeared on two different people who don’t know each other. Both of their bodies would absorb nutrients from that algae and then they’d go about their days, off in different directions. Now, stay with me here. Maybe three years later these two people are shopping in the same produce market at the same time and they lock eyes across the mango display. Suppose they’re drawn to each other because of their shared algae molecules. 

What if that’s what makes people fall in love?

Suppose happy, pleasant love is two people who like each other. Gut-wrenching, soul mate love happens because of shared history molecules. Maybe Romeo and Juliette were made from the same bowl of pasta, eaten hundreds of years before by a moody teenage boy on a vineyard in southern France.

Isn't that nice to think about?