I'm so serious.

It is the kind of weather to make you feel guilt for having to breathe, the air is so heavy. Every breath is extra-aware that there is a breath less oxygen left for everyone else.  And I swear when I stepped from the sidewalk to the grass, I could feel the heat seeping up through my sandals, as if it were a swamp and warming the air through gradual decomposition.  Or it could have just been a haze of heavy warm air swirling around my ankles, maybe trapped there by the blades of grass.  Or it is possibly only an effect of clutching heavy books extra tight, and resigning blood to reside too long in my legs.  I've been narrating in my head all day, which is its own sort of relief: I was beginning to fear that I had stopped thinking altogether.  Granted, my thoughts are fairly low-grade indulgences on the scale of thought ratings, but I imagine that their presence is healthy all the same.  Like... fiber for your brain.  It's too warm to wear t-shirts.  My shoulders were suffocating.

Humanity stopped evolving when it discovered love.  It has to be declining now, or else subtly reaching some sublime point.  Have you ever see salmon spawning?  It's not an event to chat through, not really a hang-out spot or, "Hey, neat."  The salmon turn red with hormones and blood when they turn upstream, and they are suspended against the current like--like currants, says inner rhymester, but no--like nothing, really.  What else ever fights against the flow like that?  Not that it looks like a fight at all, from the air-breathing perspective.  They seem almost leisurely about it, save for the frenetic beating of their tails, because it's so quiet.  Every now and then, there is a splash because one has broken free of the water in an attempt to gain a few feet, but besides that, there is only the sound of the river.

And every time they tire, every time they give in to a desire for rest, reprieve, the stream pulls them backwards.  Granted, I was watching at the end of their journey, almost at the spawning sites, but still--an hour's worth of hard earned inches is washed away in a second.  And there are dead salmon along the banks, and my mom (with no particular pretention to be profound) laments the loss of what is twenty dollars a pound in the grocery store, and the dead are dead in a very ultimate way.

If you can't make it upstream, you don't reproduce.  That's all.

Human logic makes the first exceptions to a beautifully elegant rule.  What if an excellent genetic structure is lost because of some chance injury that inhibits performance?  And then it's stretched--well, what is excellence? and--does not everyone have something worthwhile inside?  Compassion leaks into the last bit, sympathy and 'it could be me.'  The definition of chance injury is stretched as well--God's will might be invoked, and then Darwin has no hope at all.  Humans need to love.  It's a genetic flaw.  People will do ridiculous things for love, self-damaging things, things contrary to good species-profligation principles--monogamy, for example.  Haha.  Er.  On the bright side, the capacity for love is not genetic, not a dominant trait.  On the other side, it does not need to be.  It spawns.

The media does what it can to restore biological order.  We can't blame it.  Beautiful people fall in love with other beautiful people all over the place.  Talent takes center stage.  Protagonists find love because of the beautiful "positive" traits that are intended to make them endearing to the audience.  People with flaws, severe flaws, human flaws, are almost always depicted as in the grips of a turbulent, unideal love-life.  I assume that there is a coalition of scientists behind the curtain, encouraging their audiences to seek out perfect mates in the (equally promoted) pursuit of happiness.  Congratulations, media.  We applaud your attempts to skew society's conception of love for the good of the species.

It's worth noting that I include novels as media.  They are as guilty as anyone of airbrushing reality for artistic symmetry.  They approach reality more closely than either television or movies, but their heroes and heroines are loved for only the most romanticizable of flaws.  Pride, inapproachability, stubborness, over-garroulousness--anything that could be cute, understandable, or turned to a higher purpose.

I don't think I've ever seen affection work like that.  Reality's version of love loves imperfections with perfections as if traits cannot actually be classified as good or bad.  They just are.  La coeur a ses raisons--I've never been able to reasonably justify any of my affections.  People love because they are expected to love, sometimes, but that also ignores any evaluation of the object's worth.  Love has effectively stagnated the biological evolution of humanity, because it can no longer discern with proper objectivity which traits would best to be promoted through future generations.

In this, it is possible that humanity is evolving in another way.  At some point, love might become so blind as to skip our current short-sightedness completely.  We might become capable of loving everything, and through that love, embracing the proper stewardship of everything as well.  It is possible that the current state of the world is just an awkward phase in which we don't know how to let go of our burdens to better let other loved ones thrive, can no longer kill each other with such widespread brutality as to reduce stress on the world's resources, and do not love widely enough to make responsible decisions.  But we do love.  And love tends to beget love.  So there may yet be hope for a utopian world, though it may be a long time in evolving.

And I've used to word 'love' so much in the last paragraph that I do feel a little ill with myself.  I obviously have my own evolving to do.