Humor vs. Gravity

 This is in fact a funny planet, a humorous planet on which the basis of true humor is revealed to the human species the way the physical laws of gravity are revealed to everything, including humans.  The mere alignment of humor and gravity speaks to the basis of humor.  Gravity governs the attraction between particles as well as humans.  Humor reveals sad truths, gravity reveals attraction.  Bodies may be drawn to one another, falling objects or, for that matter, even falling wolverines are drawn to other bodies as they fall.  Persons are drawn to one another, referring to the draw as chemistry.  Depending on the way you feel about such things, being drawn to another individual may make you wish to consider you had been intimates in another life, that you are perhaps soul mates or other such phenomena, when in effect you are drawn to internalized gravity, images of some cultural or idealistic attraction which, in your romanticism, you attempt to inflate.

The sad truth, which is to say the humor, of this planet is that you are going to lose out to forces you at one time may have thought you controlled but which in reality have controlled you as much as gravity controlled you.  Even if you were at one time smart or good looking or particularly well-coordinated, it is not a good idea to think that these elements can help you with anything beyond momentary gravity; the planet is littered with monuments of individuals who have thought to better themselves by dint of good looks or smartness or such coordination as, say, Kareem Abdul Jabar or Ted Williams possessed at one time in their life span.

The steps to the next plateaus of experience come from finding a portal to a landscape in which the individual is further individualized as some form of instrument, a writer, an actor, a dancer, a poet, a biologist, dare you include editors and teachers?  You dare.  Abraham Maslow called such individuals self-actualizing and as you think about it, you believe he nearly had it; perhaps he actually did have it for him.  For you it is all about the work, which is not to be done in a vacuum because that removes you from those two immutable areas of behavior, gravity and humor.  Sad truths and attractions should not exclude you otherwise you would not be subject to the behavior others on this planet experience.  You should see yourself as a sad truth attempting to do superb work in a clatter of conflicting attractions and distractions.  Your own sense of what constitutes superb work is also subject to the sadness of revealed truth, which more often than not doesn't hand out awards for popularity or brightness or real success.  Each time you attempt a work with the determination to get maximum satisfaction from the work itself and not any prizes for originality or brilliance or even relevance, you are less likely to find yourself in the theoretical free fall in which you placed the equally theoretical wolverine a few paragraphs back.  Nor is it lost on you that some temporal success is in its way a vote of contemporary confidence which you are, from time to time, amenable. Thus gravity is able to have some effect on you after all, even though you recognize the funny nature of this planet and the laws of physical and psychological behavior that seem to hold controlling interests.

Although they were at one time great friends, one even the teacher/mentor of the other, you think Thoreau and Emerson were both fit subjects to have schools of proctology named after them.  They represent to you gravity and gravitas in action and a kind of self-delusion solipsism.

The planet as it is, funny as it is, suits you, even though sad truths abound in such degree that you cannot remain self-piteous or lonely for long because of the ongoing gravity of persons and things to which you are attracted, drawn.