He's full of words to express the simple idea that drilling holes in people's heads from birth causes hole-in-the-head syndrome. I keep trying to explain this to my Oscar's, but they still keep getting hole-in-the-head syndrome.

My aquarist believes that it's not really hexamita but a trace mineral deficiency that is the culprit. He sold me antibiotics, anyway. I refuse to use them except as a last resort. I have experience with antibiotics in fish tanks.

Instead, I encouraged my wife to expose the fish to the full scale alkalinity of the local watershed. Clean as river water doesn't seem to suit the physiology of the Oscars.

I'm full-up with crazy religionists whether they are of the supernatural or natural variety, whether they espouse the virtues of abstinence or the virtues of sterile lab equipment. Religion doesn't have all the answers and neither does Science. They all suffer from hole-in-the-head syndrome and could benefit from full scale exposure to the caustic alkalinity that is human experience.

The human experience is the phenomenon and everything else is the epiphenomenon, to include religion and the positivist-leaning science that was just as much a reaction to the religion of that day as was Martin Luther's ranting against Catholicism was in his day.

If we educated enough people well-enough at a young enough age, we would all be surprised to find out just how screwed up a predicament we are in. In general, not just because George Bush is President -- again.

We need to feel connected to something larger than ourselves because we all lack the all-important context necessary to make communication amongst ourselves meaningful enough to meet this very human need.

Perhaps if we beat our own harsh words into ploughshares instead of gun barrels we might realize we have been provided everything we need, in this moment, to be happy, whole and complete.

We have each other.

I would contribute to this extraordinary (as usual) tome that the wall isn't an obstacle, like a thick wall, but a translucent sheet of impenetrable cloth. Like kevlar, only stronger and stretchier. Stronger than spider silk.

This accounts for the pining and whining; the fantasizing and the frustration. We can see our imaginations projected onto this screen with such realism that we actually believe that we are seeing things happen outside our own mind.

Alas, we are not.

We stretch the skin of this most cerebral celluloid and it moves gently back to its original form, but two things do occur almost unbeknownst to us. One, we are given primal evidence that we can never truly touch what is on the other side of what we are perceiving, we can only touch the screen. Two, the very ancient rules we demanded conform to our pioneering spirits were designed by those who came here before us, saw the screen for what it was, and advised others who would listen accordingly.

And then the control freaks got a hold of the rules and discovered they could make a living advising people about how to have a great relationship with the screen, this obstacle, this wall. The ancient rules became as dogmatic mappings of mysterious mumblings manifested by strangers from a strange land. Because they were. They were human, true, but just because someone looks and seems to behave in a human fashion does not make them a being of a like order to ourselves.

I'm reminded of an old Johnny Hart cartoon where one character asks the question, "If man evolved from apes, then how come there are still apes?" To which the reply from another character, "because some of them were given choices."

I find that I am frequently confused as to which order of life form is more evolved, ape or man, dolphin or shark, dog or cat. Perhaps the fact that sometimes the answer is the opposite of a prior judgment suggests that the answer is, "neither."

Or, that I, like the bulk of humanity, have no true faculty or aptitude for judgment whatsoever. I only imagine that I do. There's plenty of evidence in support of my imaginings, unfortunetly it's all there...right there...on that screen.