Friday, October 27, 2006

Little Sea Monkey













From Mark Morford's column today:

Maybe we are like a giant tank of magical little Sea Monkeys, a huge glass-enclosed experiment that God saw in the back of a cosmic comic book one day, and so She sent in four billion proofs of purchase and 16 trillion box tops and She waited and waited and finally one day Cosmic FedEx finally delivered the package.

And She got all excited and set it all up and poured in the magical goop and then watched the tiny pink creatures mutate and mate and create their little cities and landscapes and mocha lattes and cars that park themselves. And lo, it was cute. For a while.

But perhaps She has exhausted this particular experiment. Perhaps disinterest has set in. The tank is, after all, growing stale. The little creatures have lost their novel vibrancy and are intentionally soiling their own tank and breeding like weeds and God is perhaps just sighing, taking another long pull from the cosmic martini and saying no, that's not quite what I had in mind at all.


I found a little sea monkey on the beach this evening who hadn't lost his vibrancy. When I asked his dad if I could take his picture, he said, "Sure!" but we couldn't get him to stay still. I found out it was the first time the kid had ever been to the ocean in his life.