Maladaptive evolutionary behaviors

Joe and Dara Ultimonomeitaliano are buying a Las Vegas vacation home. Early thirties, from New Jersey, both kind of look like Vince Vaughn.

For some reason, the Travel Channel decided to make this a show.

Which means I got to watch it early this morning while folding vast mountains of laundry and sorting through socks. Mindless television is the best thing for folding laundry, and better writers than I have tried to plumb the mystery of socks, why out of a laundry basket of – say – forty socks, only ten will find their one true mate.

I don't know whether any good writers have tried to tackle the mystery of people like the Ultimonomeitalianos, not particularly smart, not particularly attractive, oblivious to the sweeping tides of history – the Pope rallying us towards the next Crusade; wily ole Dubya persuading his good buddies in the oil industry to lower pump prices (which guarantees the Democrats will lose the November elections.) They are stupid, self-involved people – and yet they prosper! They have half a million bucks lying around in their bank account which they can afford to blow on a house in the desert where they'll maybe spend two weeks out of the year.

I guess it's true that intelligence and creativity are not evolutionarily viable adaptations.
One of the LJ journals (hate the term "blog") I track belongs to the brilliant writer, Tom Disch (tomsdisch). A recent entry:

By a Grave
It's been only a year since I died
in a Manhattan hsopital bed
but already it seems a World War ago,
like the ads in some vintage copy of Life.
The same thing must have happened
to you: in an old address book
you come upon a name and wonder who
that would have been. A friend? A plumber
someone recommended? Not a clue.
The Greeks would pour libations of wine
(because it's the color of blood, or because
it does awaken memories?) on a grave
to rouse the soul supposedly asleep
within. Someone must stir my dust
from time to time. Perhaps it's Tom
in a mood of drunken reproach
calling someone who hasn't called him
to remind them of imagined perfidies.
And *their* names drift through the hazed hall
like wisps of smoke. And I wonder
who *was* Gregory Sandler. Or Annie. Did I know
an Annie once. And then I return to my death.

--Tom Disch

Disch wrote the very brilliant science fiction novel Camp Concentration, the ultimate conspiracy theorist deconstruction of the Viet Nam war. But he wrote it a very long time ago. I'm not sure what he's written since.

I imagine Disch living in a Hell's Kitchen walk-up reminiscent of the filthy suite in a transient hotel where Fritz Leiber spent his twilight years. I knew Fritz Leiber rather well in those years before his death when my job was chauffeuring Charlie Brown – the wall-eyed Locus sci-fi magnate – around to his various appointments.

Leiber was a gentle man, courteous to a fault, but with a very dark sense of humor that only came out if he liked you.

He liked me. I was, after all, astonishingly beautiful in my twenties. Astonishingly beautiful and also astonishingly blank.

He once presented me with a huge bouquet of dead flowers.

"Living plants are so hideous, don't you think?" he asked as he pressed them into my hands. "Genitalia with chlorophyll. Only in death, do they assume structural magisterial essence." And then he cackled.

Brilliance and creativity find few rewards in this life.

In other news, the Little Store had an excellent day yesterday and it's gorgeous and sunny out. I'm off to indoctrinate little Alex in the art of making everybody who walks through the door his New Best Friend. After that, it's a day of browbeating Robin through homework projects. The History of the Bow and Arrow --- zzzzzzzzzz.