The downward crawl gains speed

IT came to me the other day as I was sitting in our gazebo watching a daddy long legs crawling up a support beam that my main purpose in life is to ponder.

No, I wasn’t exactly pondering the spider; I’m not that far over the edge, although I wondered in passing about its goal in life as opposed, say, to the intellectual goals of Snoop Dogg or Katie Couric.

I guess the editors figured me for a ponderer too, which is why I am back here in a quiet place between the movie ads and the comics, where I am not disturbed by loud noises or humid winds blowing out of Chicago.

It’s kind of a gazebo of the mind, where oak trees shade my psyche and butterflies flutter through my muses.

What had me pondering on a sunny afternoon a few days ago as I rested my battered leg in our real gazebo was the realization that our youngest grandson, Joshua, will be starting school this semester.

I was thinking what a strange world he’s getting into and began worrying about his future. Like most liberal pukes, I worry a lot about almost everything, although I got over weeping for the snail darter when I discovered it was a fish. I thought it was a snail, one of those little creatures longing to be free and being stepped on or poisoned by vengeful gardeners.

My concern with Josh isn’t just that he’s being dropped behind the looking glass into a world consumed by hatred and self-destruction. I’m also concerned about the craziness of, well, just about everything.

We exist in an oddball landscape where our film realities are increasingly becoming animated figures and superheroes have taken over solving the world’s ailments with muscle and magic instead of brainpower.

Female celebrities, whose decolletage once revealed only 15% of their breasts, now give us a 92% look as they go parading down the red carpet or across a beach wearing just enough to remain legal while the paparazzi zoom in from helicopters and dune buggies to catch the gleam of their thong-bared behinds.

Magazines intended for the barely literate celebrate every inch of the Hollywoodian female lineup from poor, dim Paris Hilton to a flock of widely smiling women whose goal in life is to be in a sex scene with Brad Pitt.

We can’t wait to know who’s pregnant, who’s married, who’s divorced (and how often), who’s sleeping with whom and who’s dating Dakota Fanning. And, hey, what about all of that mystery surrounding the golden Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes baby? Was it really born in a manger on an island in the Indian Ocean? Can it really levitate on its own? Were its first words, “I love you, L. Ron Hubbard”? Oh, Tom, tell us please.

Now pan to the world of sports, where we’re still wondering if our heroes on bicycles, baseball diamonds and track fields are boosting their physical capabilities by popping little green pills or mixing powdery stuff into their Gatorade and emerging from the dosage with the power to leap tall buildings at a single bound and power home run balls into orbit.

And what about chess masters and kids who win spelling bees and teenage boys with pimples and horn-rimmed glasses who can hack into the Pentagon and launch nuclear missiles whenever they chose? Are they on some kind of performance-enhancing drug too? A mind drug? How else would a 13-year-old kid know how to spell a word like “appoggiatura” unless he’s tripping out in hyperspace, communicating with word gods?

I’m not sure how one can parlay a spelling bee victory into big bucks, but if there’s a way, someone’s going to find it. Money, not art or intellectual achievement, is the new American dream; riches that can buy a man all the beer he can drink and a woman all the breast-boosting, tummy-tucking, butt-building, nose-changing, chin-fixing and lip-puffing that she needs to transform her into Angelina Jolie.

When the California lottery is at $100 million, America is lined up down the block, around the corner, up over a hill, across a creek and down a freeway to buy tickets, clutching iconic photos of Donald Trump as they inch forward. When it’s $10 million, no one shows. Hell, who needs 10 lousy million? They’ll be back when it tops 50.

I sat in the gazebo watching the daddy long legs make its way to the top and then turn and start down again. We’re sort of doing the same thing, I think: Having reached the top, we’re now crawling downward in so many ways.

But I grew tired of pondering, knowing that it was just going to lead me to worrying about war, hatred and General George W. Bush waving a cross and a flag to intimidate the world but suddenly frightening no one. I don’t want to think about Joshua getting into that kind of place. The day is too sunny.

I’ll give him a hug and a pat and head off to a brief vacation in the mountains to heal my aching leg and my aching mind and worry about nothing more than that poor spider trying to reach the bottom. Maybe we’ll meet him there someday.