Honey

City Island, The Bronx.  Young Hannah considers the gift of honeycomb.  By her side, a half-million honeybees toil deep into autumn, pollinating fall flowers and gathering nectar and pollen in the process.  It is a grand testament to the connectivity of things that the honeybee exists at all.  The by-product of its survival methods is the pollination of a vast amount of angiosperms – flowering plants, without which a majority of terrestrial species, including our own, would likely die. 

The honeybee accounts for pollination of one-third of the U.S. diet.  The agriculture industry is dependent upon the fuzzy fliers to the tune of $15 billion.  State economies, interstate commerce and the livelihood of thousands or more farmers and their families rely on bee colonies. 

Colony collapse disorder is threatening the global bee population.  This is largely an onus of the commercial honeybee industry, however, if it spreads, all the world’s honeybees will be in danger and the consequences are dire. 

There is an unsubstantiated quote, attributed to Einstein, that says if the honeybees go, humans are soon to follow.  Though I have been unable to find an original incarnation of this quote, the idea seems viable.  Without pollination, plants die.  Without plants, we die. 

The end.

Infectious

The Word Virus.  That’s what the Commissioner said.  Words are infectious.  Ideas are disease.  Today I heard “verboten” in the morning.  An utterance by a fragrant photographer in a funny black hat.  He showed me images of Nawlins’, and the Iraq War.  He chastised me for not shooting chinese chefs on break from the hot kitchen, eating with chopsticks from white bowls, lined up seated along the sidewalk.  I didn’t want to intrude on their personal space.  Now I don’t believe they had personal space.  Culture, no mind. Out on the street, we’re all fair game.

 And then it came again, at about 6:30 p.m.  “Verboten,” in a lecture about covering immigrants.  And I thought, how is it, that in such disparate places, this same, odd word would make its appearance again.

I come back to the Commissioner because he is so often right.  Words are like disease.  They spread from place to place, constrained by no metabolic proclivity, no metaphysical reasoning.  They transmit ideas like fire raging through actions of miniscule sparks flying across a highway on a hot California night.  And I am a repository for the sickness.  And I will spread it too.

Everyone here gets out alive

Vicious are some of the people here, in the hallowed ivy halls.  A severe disease of hyper-competitiveness pervades an otherwise genial scene.  Great swaths of student chatter in the class-wide lectures, swinging necks, like giant cranes, or the ponderous swivel of a head towards the who’s who, the popular kids, the clique in the corner that everyone wants to be a member of.  That kind of shit isn’t absent from this place.  It’s magnified.  By intelligence, success and proliferation of psychological techniques, there are those among the student population who think – rather, know – they are better than everyone else.

Fortunately, I don’t know any of these people personally.  They hide in plain site and won’t deign to talk to me.  So from squinted eyes, I happily judge them.  Behind a veneer of false smiles, I watch, keenly waiting for them to falter and flail in full view.  And I prosecute, judge and execute them and go on with my day.