Flagrant Pork The Colossal Colon Tommy Tapeworm The Cotton-Eating Moths of Australia Excessive Deer Doots The Fabulous Snake Doots The Fierce Prune-Eating Hamsters from Space The Flaming Booty Moths The Flaming Croutons The Flaming Salmonella Units The Flying Shards Italic Squirrels Little Heed Pinot Noir and his Nuances of Toast Sheep Eyeballs Short Shrift Shy Fruiter and the Saplings Slippery Spleens The Turkey Spiders Violently Fracturing Water Closets Rodent Passion Kung Fu Trees Combat Alfalfa Nuclear Underpants The Groin Whappers Thrusting Balloon Puppies The Moos of Derision Flaming Booty Moths Slippery Spleens Weasel Nostrils Italic Squirrels Little Heed Short Shrift Groping For Elmo Pig-Stinging Jellyfish Fugitive Squirrel and the Clearly Disturbed Beavers The Mighty Shaking Wattles Drawers Full of Slugs Brilliant Thighs Paint Peeling Puffs of Flatulence Foliage Eaters Mosquito Hunter and the Unreliable Pollinators Marcel and the Turpitudes Duane Ketter and his Wildlife Technicians Decomposing Tubers Bill and the Bracts The Radioactive Muskrats Dewayne Hurlmont and the Compunctions of Soul Rapid Sucking Action Contaminated Tumbleweeds Varlet and the Squeaking Codpieces Violently Fracturing Water Closets The Flying Shards Eerie Groin Legumes Fierce Prune-Eating Hamsters From Space Virtual Weasils The Thriving Balkan Prunes Legendary Carp Disoriented Chickadees Hearty Polyp Chuckles Weasel Feet Mature Hamsters Elmo Wendorf and the Cow Fitters Yuck Bomb Invasion of the Dork Tourists From Space Hawley Smoot Tariff Blood Sucking Death Cabbages From Hell Glass Eyeball Caper Wild Rotting Potatoes Martian Death Flu Death Squid Comically Monikered Pullet Surprise Low Flow Toilets Cones of Doom Tater Silo Stealth Thong Tactical Field Brassiere Body Stapler Kit Quid Pro Quo Death Comet Blowtorch Noogie Umbrella Cheese Buck Naked Oenologists Soccer Lizards Hamelin Poolites Noogie Booger Invasion of Slugs Roaches 2.0 Pregnant Mustard

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.

'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.

They've served their purpose.

Nature is unsentimental.

Death is built in.

We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. ~Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tam Pico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. "How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.