WHY YOU ....!? What makes us so mean? We are meaner than the Dark, the ones we like to blame our genetic aggression on. It is in our nature to hide behind what Darwin said about survival, as if survival were the most important thing on earth. It isn't. You know—surely it has occurred to you— that there is no way that humankind will survive another million years. We'll be lucky to be around another five hundred. Why? Because we are so mean that we would rather Do everyone and everything on earth than let anybody get the better of us: "Give me liberty or give me gone!" Why didn't he just say "Grrr, let's Done each other!"? A nosegay of pansies leans toward us in a glass of water on a white tablecloth bright in the sunlight at the ocean where children are frolicking, then looking around and wondering— about what we cannot say, for we are imagining how we would Pain the disgusting man and woman at the next table. Tonight we could throw an electrical storm into their bed. No more would they spit on the veranda! Actually they aren't that bad, it's just that I am talking mean in order to be more like my fellow humans—it's lonely feeling like a saint, which I do one second every five weeks, but that one second is so intense I can't stand up and then I figure out that it's ersatz, I can't be a saint, I am not even a religious person, I am hardly a person at all except when I look at you and think that this life with you must go on forever because it is so perfect, with all its imperfections, like your waistline that exists a little too much, like my hairline that doesn't exist at all! Which means that my bald head feels good on your soft round belly that feels good too. If only everyone were us! I had better go back to the bank, we have only three hundred and eighty-five dollars left. Those fifteen units of beauty went fast. As does everything. But meanness comes back right away while kindness takes its own sweet time and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and behind, swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it and then only for a moment. How can I trap it? Allow it in and then turn my body into steel? No. The exit holes will still be there and besides compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit— from the prison that each moment is, and just as each moment replaces the one before it each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it and pretty soon you get to like those jolts, you and millions of other dolts who like to be done. by their own feelings. The hippopotamus sits on you with no sense of pleasure, he doesn't even know you are there, any more than he takes notice of the little white bird atop his head, and when he sees you flattened against the ground he doesn't even think Uh-oh he just trots away with the bird still up there looking around. Saint Augustine stole the pears from his neighbor's tree and didn't apologize for thirty years, by which time his neighbor was probably dead and in no mood for apologies. Augustine's mother became a saint and then a city in California—Santa Monica, where everything exists so it can be driven past, except the hippopotamus that stands on the freeway in the early dawn and yawns into your high beams. "Hello," he seems to grunt, "I can't be your friend and I can't be your enemy, I am like compassion, I go on just beyond you, no matter how many times you crash into me and die because you never learned to crash and live." Then he ambles away. Could Saint Augustine have put on that much weight? I thought compassion makes you light or at least have light, the way it has light around it in paintings, like the one of the screwdriver that appeared just when the screw was coming loose from the wing of the airplane in which Santa Monica was riding into heaven, smiling as if she had just imagined how to smile the first smile of any saint, a promise toward the perfection of everything .