Her Earthness's progression from voluptuous young MILF of the Stone Age to today's mustachioed motorcycle meth-hag makes sense in many ways, and the trail of clues leading to the proper place to the lay the blame is as easy to follow as the final version of Anna Nicole's E! True Hollywood Story.
Early on, back when the first coat of paint wasn't even dry on the cave walls, Bunga-Bung watched things come to something he was realizing was Life. Life was growing and sprouting forth from every direction he looked. When something green or grainy wasn't shooting up out of the ground or out the end of a tree branch, something screaming and squirmy was shooting out of the nearest tribal female. It wasn't beyond his mammoth-meat muddled mind to detect the connection between her... and Her. Lucky for Bunga-Bung and his buddies, due to some ancient alignment in Captain Carbon's Cardgame, the Pink Ladies split their jacks and went home with pockets full of nature and nurture, while the T-Birds doubled-down on muscle and drew the Queen of Diamonds (who we all know 'will beat you if she's able'). The fairer sex hardly ever gave any lip in those days of the club and heavy rock, and likewise the ever-accomodating Terra also seemed content to settle for her relationship with this league-bowling, pit-stained alcoholic and his multi-religious sanctioned totalitarian rule.
However, if we delve deeper into the relationship, we can see the pattern that has grown all too familiar in these days of such trailer park trysts. Insecurity and fear are the intoxicants that dull the ever-expanding mind of this slowly evolving Homerest of Simpsons. From the time of his revolutionary harnessing of the power of mud, it is clear that mankind has done his best not only to dominate, but also to adhere himself to beloved Mother Earth in a profoundly Freudian way that can't be touched by therapy or thorazine. We constructed, first out of mortar and granite, and later with concrete and Rearden Steel, an ever deepening anchor into the Missus. We trot across the arid asphalt in between, corner to right-angled corner, in a vain attempt to leave our manly scent on every remotely flat surface. From the first Egyptian obelisk to the friggin' Empire State Building, we have been engaged in a species-long show of testosteronic towering over Mother Earth. A belief that now is beginning to look like equal parts fallacy and 'phallus'y.
Somehow through it all, dear sweet Mother has continued to take it all in stride. "He'll come around," she whispers into the wind of the spreading mushroom cloud. "He's good to me, when he's not in one of his moods."
What could it possibly be that keeps Her from slamming the door and turning off the gravity switch and just letting our sorry asses float right away -- from the comforting arms of the Mother, into the slathering fangs of the Maw? Is she afraid that the dolphins and chimps won't be able to meet Her at Her level? I certainly can't picture a chimp tossing a toxic coal waste cocktail in Her face and then dumping last night's empties into the contaminated pond behind his neighbor's house -- at least not for four or five million years or so.
But with the exception of Her occasional outburst, particularly those we measure in terms such as 8.7 or Category 5, She continues to put up with an awful lot. Wouldn't you think that there's some point where She's going to realize that Her club trumps Man's spade (and bulldozer) in this cosmic casino? After all, self-preservation is the most basic instinct of the living thing. If you have something living on your skin, you are probably going to try to find some fine ointment --brand new and expensive -- to get it cleared up. In this case the severity of the blemish is up to us. Would we rather be a beauty mark on Gaia's cheek, or a wart on Mother NaturEarth's nose?
I just sort of feel like we better start bringing home some pretty darn nice flowers one of these days, or dear old Mother is going to come down on us harder than she did on the Heat Miser when he didn't want to let it snow in Southtown. I've always thought that she was kind of tough on her boys in that Christmas special, but now that I think about it, she's got plenty of reason to be bitter. And we've got even more reasons to be sweet.
