August 29, 2018
You really like exchanging your atoms, wheeling and dealing bits and pieces of yourself and doing the old switcheroo with other action-hungry complex molecules.
You’re patient as you endure long stretches of stability—because you’re itching for something way beyond stability. You want exchanges. Exchanges, yes, hell yeah, the more complex the better. You make credit default swaps look like tic-tac-toe. You’re eager to intercourse your way around the biochemical jungle gym, and up the food chain.
Let’s say you’re an organic molecule in the juicy part of an orange. You and your bros are the spawn of dirt, water, seed, and sunshine (they had a four-way) and you all wound up as parts of a fruit cell in an orange plucked from a tree in Florida, after which you landed in a grocery store in Richmond, Virginia. Soon you’re out of the grocery store, on your way to an over-sized shelter with a fruit-eater on the prowl.
Suddenly, with no warning, the peel is stripped away and you are awash in mass mastication in a mammal’s mouth. It’s all shocking and exciting, and it’s all happening quickly now. You’re already making overtures to other complex molecules, but before you can consummate anything, what? You’re being swallowed, it doesn’t take long . . . the action is crazy down here, lots and lots of action with molecules and enzymes and acids and microbes at a supercharged atomic swap meet. Exuberation! Surfing on waves of the Great Life Ocean! Organic molecule enlightenment! Everything is becoming something else! This is what organic molecules live for.
Meanwhile, many of your fellow molecular sojourners are cast on a completely different journey. The orange peel, comprised of related organic molecules that enabled you to achieve your destiny in a mammal’s stomach, is strewn on a countertop like garbage, and sure as hell, a billion peel molecules wind up in the garbage can. Where nothing is happening but a slow death by desiccation until they’re carted away on Tuesday to the landfill.
Meanwhile, Tuesday is another enlightened lifetime from now as you become part of the transaction that forms this Short Cut. That’s right. The author is the mammal who ate you, and you achieved organic molecule nirvana by becoming part of the energy exchange in the author’s brain which enabled him to share your amazing saga of transformation from Florida dirt to intellectual immortality.
But, wait! There’s more! Upon reading what he had written, he-who-ingested-you ran straight to the garbage can containing next Tuesday’s landfill contributions, and rescued your orange peel cousins plus two apples cores and a thatch of carrot tops. Hence was born the backyard compost event. So, the billion orange peel cells and the gathering family of other organic molecules joined a swap meet extravaganza that lasted for weeks of cool, damp, dark action deep in the dirt. Where the action is. And they all lived happily ever after by becoming something else entirely.
So, the two morals of story are:
- May all your oranges inspire you to honor the peel.
- Be nice to the microbes, and the microbes will be nice to you.
