Mayday

photo by Ajat

All those cops on horseback and in riot gear were no doubt, to paraphrase the words of former Chicago mayor, Richard Daley, “not there to create disorder, but to preserve disorder” and, from all accounts, they did a fine job, with scarcely a broken window reported, but had they followed several score bicycles from the downtown retail core of our fair city to its favored beachfront on this International Workers’ Day, they’d have been able to witness all the mayhem they could handle as the perfect combination of record-breaking warm temperatures and overflowing liberty, fraternity, and equality gave rise to some serious maypole-dancing that couldn’t possibly be legal given how deliriously delightful it was in all its many forms

Perfect trines formed in the sky between the moon, Jupiter, and a handful of lucky stars, depth charges of beer in the fire exploded not once, but twice, and sedate computer and engineering professionals morphed into pagan minotaurs, all of this well before the waxing crescent had even set in the western horizon.

Human beings everywhere acted human and while I felt a little bad for the quiet couple who had cuddled up under a blanket to share a romantic evening only to be descended upon by a scene from Fellini, it wasn’t a night for apologies, but rather, for embracing the sheer exuberance of it all no matter what you’d expected in the beginning.

I wonder what adaptive advantage the ability to perceive beauty has provided for us; did our hunter-gatherer ancestors who could stand out on the savannah and experience aesthetic awe at the colors and shapes around them do a better job of passing down their DNA than their less appreciative brethren?

Or perhaps it’s just an anomaly, and atavism like the appendix, there, but not really doing anything; if so, I take it as a miraculous gift, one Marx himself would endorse, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.