So, that first asterisk from like, three entries back. After Me gusta, Spanish for 'I like it', root-wise, 'I'd eat it.'

*We eat because we love.

Let me elaborate.

My sister once asked me, after having played with a friend's son, "Why is it that when a baby is cute, we say they're so cute we could just eat them? Why do we say that? It's not like we actually want to eat them, but that's the only way to describe that feeling."
And you know sometimes, how when you're kissing someone, you just feel this passion or desire like you want to eat them, consume them, swallow them whole in one big gulp. Not vampirism, but an emotional feeling as opposed to the actual desire to eat.

I think I know where that feeling comes from. When we find something truly beautiful, something that amazes us and touches us to the core, our deepest desire is to be one with it. All cheesiness aside. And in our physical, embodied existence, the only way we have to completely incorporate something is to eat it. (In: in. Corpore: body. -ate. To put in your body.) So there's this uncontrollable desire to be one with this other being, place, whatever, because it is so dear and beautiful, Me gusta, I like it, I LOVE it, I'd eat it! If I could.

And the other day, I was thinking about digestion: whatever does not become me, I eliminate. 'Elimination' is used as a technical term for pissin' and poopin'. But that works as a statement about life, too. When something is 'becoming', it means it suits you, it becomes you. And when there are things in your life that do not become you, ideally, you eliminate them. Destructive habits, bad acquaintances. This doesn't always happen; sometimes they hang around, fester, harden, and you get a blocked colon or a gall stone that's incredibly painful to pass. Know what I mean?

And I wanted to give you an excerpt from a letter I once wrote to someone who insinuated that I didn't like or couldn't take weight with beauty:

As for weight with beauty, what's not to like? Okay, enough kidding. I'll tell you some of what I feel when I feel weight with beauty.

Once I was in a forest in a far-off land gathering mushrooms with my sister and a near-stranger. I... don't really have words for it. It was holy. It was all the forests that unicorns were ever shown to have loved, complete with sun and bees and berries and pale green and gold. What a typical scene of beauty, no? Everywhere I turned it was hitting me over the head with itself until I was weak with it. The thing I wanted most was to explode, into a million dust motes, and have one piece of me land on every bit that I saw and loved in that second. There was real pain in knowing that to even be able to appreciate the beauty, to just know that it's there, is to be separate from it; that in achieving that oneness, that full embrace of beauty, would be to lose awareness of that beauty forever. That's weight to me (and that's not even all). And it HURTS, okay. Till that I could die of it. It's fucking terrible and it never really goes away. Beauty is a nasty name for what it is because it doesn't even hint at the fact that it's vicious, that it'll tear you apart and not stop even when you ask it to.

That's weight to me. And I love it, oh my god. I love it to tears, I love it to death. There's some cliche's for you.

The only way I find to bear that weight--to take it and walk with it--is to whistle and pretend it weighs nothing at all.

That's all I got to say 'bout that.

3:53 p.m. 2003-10-30�