SPARKLY THINGS

I love shopping malls. Malls is America, don'cha know, especially now that they got not only the big stores, but those little booths outside. Very democratic. Big enterprise and small trying to catch the eye of women and their purses.

I feel so connected to the whole of humanity in a mall. It's every marketplace throughout the history of civilization, said history really being just the history of shopping made to look like the males was doing something more than making pretty things and places to attract women.

Anyway, I was outside Bloomingdales at the Century City mall, sitting in the sun and sipping a cup of coffee with a friend. The little booth across from us was twinkling with sparkly accessories: hair clips, pins, earrings, buttons, purses. You name it - it had rhinestones all over it. Many people say your flashy is trashy, but those people is just repressed, or worse, trying to prove we humans ain't animals when you scratch the surface of your cerebral cortex.

Descartes, he only got it half right when he said "I think therefore I am." He shoulda said, "I think therefore I am not doing anything important right now." The thinking part is pretty new, and while your higher human brain activities like compassion, using the subjunctive tense, and conceptualizing quantum entanglement are nifty, they are resting on the older mammal brain with its mysteries of your mommy love and your sense of humor, which anybody who has played with a dog knows is pretty well developed in your four-legged friends.

This Mammal Brain in turn is sitting on top of the Reptile Brain that really runs the show. Marketers know this, which explains the success of campaigns offering more food as in Super Sizing and implied sex as in girls as naked as TV will allow sucking beer right from the bottle. So long as Reptile Brain is active, Human Brain is dissolved into that great pool on being that your zen masters spend a lifetime trying to find with only the poor cortex, them not wanting to ride their mental crocodile to bliss 'cuz it has a habit of turning on you and then you'd never be able to come up for air and think like Descartes again.

Which brings us back to sparkles. Your human eye has both rods and cones. Cones is where we see color. They need a lot of light to work and are grouped more in the middle of the eye. Rod only tell black from white, but they are much more sensitive to light and motion, and are more concentrated around the edges. Not only that, your rods are hooked right into your Reptile Brain.

So a movement out the corner of your eye grabs your attention no matter what the Descartes part of the brain is thinking. And every girl in rhinestones knows (as well as some boys who want to appeal to boys and so wear, say, a set of keys hooked to flash and dangle outside their pocket...) that motion and flash are the way to make a man's reptile self turn his head and look with his reptile eyes.

And while he's looking with his reptile eyes, he might just notice how sexy she is and fall in love. He don't know what made him turn his head at the exact moment She was walking by. He figures Kismet, Fate, Destiny. But she knows the real cause. Rhinestones.