I am walking past the shops on West 4th, enjoying the crisp November air that is snapping from the Hudson. I have become more slumberous, heavier now in the cooler tick – and the more carnal creep toward winter. I can feel it in my knees – weight and age and season – each step a nano-bit more ginger than the last.
I am breaking in a new pair of walking shoes. I am told that “walking shoes” has a distinctly dated ring, (the actual phrase shared with me was “elderly-sounding”), and in mixed company I will defer to the Dicks Sporting Goods “trail runners” identification. It is more acceptable to use the retail descriptive when attempting to be seamless in social settings. And seamlessness is important. But I am marveling at their rubber-toed ugliness now, their waterproof and cleat-soled utility, their cushy knee-preserving comforts.
I bought the walking shoes as a small material reward to myself. They are simple and tangible items that can be pointed to and brought out and worn and steadied and brandished. Dicks Sporting Goods was having an Election Day Weekend promotion. My walking shoes were exclusive of that promotion. That was what the Dicks Sporting Goods saleswoman told me. I am not usually drawn to exclusivities, but the promise of a deal around a democratic event pulled me in.
Yesterday was Election Day. I live in New Jersey, where the crisp air seems to originate today and where the Democratic Party columns were widely selected in curtained machines in towns in every county. New Jersey’s population is projected to decrease for the first time in recorded history. The projected reduction is due specifically to the ongoing increases in property taxes and automobile insurance. I am interested in population movements, and this abandonment seems so clearly tied to the Democratic Party and their fiscal policies. And yet the populations vote them in again.
I live in a misinformed state.
One of my neighbors had a political sign planted on his lawn. It read:
VOTE YES FOR PROPOSAL #3
I did not know Proposal #3 and was not sure that I could trust it. There are too many biblical and other conspiracy associations with that number for me to feel entirely comfortable in choosing it. A few houses north, another neighbor’s political sign read:
KEEP TAXES DOWN – VOTE NO ON ALL PROPOSALS
That one had a nice nihilistic ring to it. Vote no on everything.
Now I am in Washington Square Park. Here there are jugglers, lazing NYU students, miscreants and the alternative mindsets. But I am stopped by the strikingly friendly smile of a dark-skinned Caribbean man. He is beseeching me with a simple chrome-toothed smile – brilliant sunlight refracted and dancing in his mouth.
He is a Siren. Somewhere I know this truth – that he is some kind of sentinel, gleaming as he is in this small Manhattan park. Everything is easy. He is and I am and the cement below us both is – but that could be due to my shoes. A cadence is being readied, and then it is delivered – a kind concussion. And he is speaking.
“Yo,” he says, smiling – a dazzle of silver teeth, easy brown eyes.
I stop, my hands dumb and dangling at my sides. I have nothing to say – coming to a stop is comment enough.
“You shopping,” he asks.
I want to show him my walking shoes. I am in the market for other things – pants and maybe a new belt. My waist has a determination in its somewhat new thicker circumference. But it is not possible that he knows this. I guess I could tell him. I want to tell him so much more – a confession I have been honing like a yeast. I have so much to share, so vast an inventory to explore. I wonder too now if he is shopping – because he has found a store between us. I will say it and I will not say it together.
Mitochondria have their own DNA. I was brought up through the public school system to believe them to be the POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL. The reality is different. It is a completely different organism that lives inside the host cell – a symbiotic relationship struck a long, long, long time ago to give birth to the kingdoms of complex multi-cellular creatures. The bigger fact is that before Mitochondria, life – as simple as it was – participated in savage wars. Bacteria against bacteria against viruses against bacteria. The curiosity in all of this is that this partnership between an invaded strand of bacteria and its Mitochondria invader yielded every dimension of visible life form. It is simply the most productive known partnership ever.
Our species is a member of the visible life matter spawned from this partnership. This is why we share so much DNA with bacteria. We are also participants in this festering war between cells – punctuated here and there with the benign common cold and moving on through the more nasty viral and bacterial applications. It is my core and most fundamental belief that human beings have been assembled through this ancient partnership with Mitochondria to eradicate the single-celled enemies of the Mitochondria. That is our purpose. The assembly of our brain matter is a mobility to construct and deconstruct on visible and invisible planes. In this regard, we are puppet-like grunts – but our anthropocentric belief systems will likely not allow us to fully embrace our role in just one colony of an empire we can barely comprehend. The pharmaceutical onslaught that we have created is just one example of the Mitochondria’s war machine. We are a very impressive weapon assemblage, and our achievements in other areas and miscues in other areas are side projects against the overall Mitochondria objective.
I am not shopping. I am too much entangled in consumption. And there is a season upon us.
Leave Your Comments