There is a Science Man notion, that has been around for about a hundred years or so, and that is known as Dollo's law, for the fellow who propounded it—Louis Dollo, a Belgian miner, who liked to build dinosaurs. And Dollo's law, it is this: "evolution is not reversible."

However, and as generally, eventually, occurs, with most all the laws, Dollo's law, it has been found to be Wrong. And so, it is being repealed.

We know that Dollo's law, it it is Wrong, from the dust mites.

Who are furiously sculling, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

A study shows that certain organisms can undergo reverse evolution, that is, go back to the way they were living before evolving new traits. The study challenges the idea that evolution is uni-directional and an organism can't undo changes.

The idea that organisms can't revert back is held by Dollo's law, which states "that evolution is not reversible; i.e., structures or functions discarded during the course of evolution do not reappear in a given line of organisms."

The study was conducted by a research team led by two biologists from University of Michigan who conducted the study on common house mites that live on mattresses, sofas and carpets. These mites have evolved from parasites that have in turn come from free-living microbes.

"All our analyses conclusively demonstrated that house dust mites have abandoned a parasitic lifestyle, secondarily becoming free-living, and then speciated in several habitats, including human habitations," according to Pavel Klimov and Barry O'Connor of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Researchers found that the mites have gone back to the ways of their ancestors by beginning to live independently; a phenomenon which goes against the idea that evolution only goes forward.

I am not at all surprised that the dust mites, they have succeeded in reversing the controls of evolution. Because I have long known them to be creatures who are capable of anything.

This truth was first vouchsafed to me when I returned home one day to discover that I had suddenly spent $1750 on a Kirby vacuum cleaner.

The asphalt, it ended, many miles, before our home. Nonetheless, and in my absence, some demonic vacuum-pusher, he had managed to penetrate the wilds, knock upon our door, gain admittance, and then proceed to terrify my then-wife, then-pregnant, by running his roaring dust-mucker across the nether regions of our bed. Sucking up mass quantities of extremely unsettling detritus, which he identified as dust mites and skin flakes. Convincing her that she must purchase, and At Once, one of his Kirbys, the only instrument extant that could ensure that the whole of our abode would not soon disappear beneath a veritable tsunami of unutterable filth.

I had been aware, that pregnant women, they can be prone to sudden, intense cravings. I had not known, that they could be prone to a sudden, intense craving, to purchase a vacuum cleaner, that cost more than the GDP of some nations.

Learn something new, do we, every day.

The Kirby, I had to admit, was impressive. Though it always seemed to me that it possessed far more power than anyone in the civilian sector might ever want or need. For, if it was not carefully controlled, it would ravenously inhale not only dust mites and skin flakes, but also socks, pencils, newspapers, cassette tapes, and small animals. On full power, it possessed roughly the pull of a black hole. Thus, on occasion, when we grew bored, my then-wife and I, we would lounge around out on the porch, and use it to suck F-16s out of the sky.

When, some years later, we parted, she and I, the Kirby, it went with her. Which was only fair, as she had more of a close, personal relationship with it, than did I. She to this day still has it: I believe a Kirby is warrantied for the lifetime of the planet. And, she has found uses for it, that I do not believe are recommended by the manufacturer.

For instance, once she was on the phone with me, moaning that she was going to need to divorce some husbands. This was maybe the second, and/or third, husband, after me: I don't precisely recall. In any event, he, and/or they, were being dumb husbands, and did not want to go. She said that the prospect of enduring the divorce process with such creatures, it was more than she could bear; she would prefer, she said, to just shoot the husband(s), and bury them in the backyard. I pointed out that most women who bury their husbands in the backyard, they are eventually found out, and have to go into the prison.

"Why not use the Kirby?" I suggested. That machine, at only about half-power, it could suck a husband right up: he would completely vanish. Everyone would think he had just gone out one night for cigarettes, and then never returned. As men, they are wont, to do.

She very much liked this idea. And has since employed the Kirby to wholly disappear at least two obdurate husbands.

When I was first confronted with the specter of Sarah Palin, I was convinced she was not Real. Just a simulacrum, I figured, run up by the jugglers and the clowns steering the Old Man Shouts At Cloud campaign, in a desperate bid to inject some approximation of ghastly would-be life, into a thoroughly comatose endeavor.

But, once illumed by the dust-mite-devolution revelation, I reflected that it was equally possible that she was indeed Real. It's just that she is a human who has, like the dust mites, reversed the evolutionary controls. Passed into ur-humanness. Into a time when humans had not yet mastered language, or sense, or even the ability to walk upright. Which is why her butt is always sticking out, like a freaking baboon. She has de-evolved to the point where humans could not yet straighten their spines.

Dust-mite-style devolution, it also explains both The Mad Bomber, and The Hairball. The people of The Mad Bomber, they have devolved back to wanting to be ruled by family dynastic blood-queens, like a Borgia, or maybe one of those German royals the British imported after the Norman bloodlines played out. While the people of The Hairball, they have devolved back to yearning for the sort of authoritarian strongman that bestrode the globe back in the mid-20th Century, when the planet was plagued with the likes of Franco, Mussolini, Churchill, de Gaulle, Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin, Tito, Mao, et al.

My friend M., he has never had any laws named for him—like that Dollo fellow—but he has certainly hatched some interesting notions.

As an example, and after living for some years in the mountains, he concluded that humans, they did not evolve from other primates, as so twists the britches of the fundies, but instead from trees. Humans, pronounced he, are trees, with feet. And, today, the more the Science Men learn about trees, the more plausible this seems. Like, most recently, it has been determined that trees, at night, sleep, and rest their branches, when they do.

We know from the true-life non-fiction tome Bard that, when the Celts arrived in Ireland, the indigenous Tuatha de Dannan, weary of contending with endless waves of rambunctious interlopers, decided to give up the ghost, and enter into the trees. Going home again, as it were, if the M. theorem, it would be true. (That the Tuatha de Dannan, they went into the trees, this is why, to this day, it is not a real good idea, to cut down a tree, there in Ireland, without first seeking, many, many, arboreal permissions.)

Some of the Tuatha de Dannan, they retreated instead to Tir Na Nog, which is a realm under the sea. This place is not seen, but is touched upon, in Into The West, one of the five essential films of Jim Sheridan (the other four: In The Name Of The Father, Some Mother's Son, The Boxer, In America), which everyone, should watch, and every day.

Because, as it is truly said—as above, so below—there is also in the sky a reflected and refracted Tir Na Nog, which appears on nights of the full moon. It is sometimes known as Tir-na Nog'th, and may be, wispily, apprehended, under that name, in the true-life non-fiction series of Roger Zelazny tomes, rubriced The Chronicles Of Amber.

It is possible—and, in truth, advisable—to walk there. All the way. To Tir Na Nog.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jGAvi2p1KE]

A woman I know, from Middle Earth, she, when a young lass, around about five years of age, she would go out into the woods, and there listen to the trees, talking to one another. But their language, it rang kind of harsh and grating, to her young ears. So she gave it up. Until, she was more ready, to hear.

Humans, we know from the grand-guignol Paint Your Wagon, go out among the trees, and there blither and blabber to them, without listening to what the trees themselves have to say. There is even a song about this: "I Talk To The Trees." In the crime-against-humanity film version of Wagon, this song is emitted by Clint Eastwood. I could embed it here, but then people would have to go into the hospital, and some of them might later sue me. So I shall offer the Smothers Brothers version, instead.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P1qnd65IjM]

My friend M., he says the trees themselves, they prefer the Chet Baker rendition.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akBff675l1Y]

The Smothers Brothers, they had a television show. But the brothers, they disfavored dumbshittery, like the United States warring against the Vietnamese. And they said so. And so, the network, it yanked the brothers, right off the air.

Today, the United States, it shall be selling weapons, to the Vietnamese.

It is utter absurdities like this, which indicate that most of the "news," it is just shit made up. Because no actual Real beings, would, or could, behave, in such ways.

That the "news" is mostly a figment: this can be tracked. Sometimes, for my own amusement, I log some of the more obvious outbursts of nuttery. On those occasions, when, They, let the veil slip. More, than the usual, little, bit.

For instance, on just one day, back in May of 2012, I encountered the following headlines: "Docs Reveal Hitler Farted, Received Sex Injections, Craved Cocaine"; "Man Exposes Himself At Association For The Blind"; "Missing Parakeet Returned Home After Telling Police His Address"; and "Why It Matters That Obama Dated A Composite And Ate A Dog."

I mean: come on. Really.

They were so carried away during this period—spring fever, I reckon—that, just a few days later, They saturated the "news" with something so preposterous that it became clear beyond doubt that we are all simply being mucked with.

For every time I turned on the radio, or looked into a tube, I beheld an alleged high government official, there soberly intoning, that the United States, it is menaced, by underpants.

Massing out there, these underpants, nefariously bent on exploding airplanes, pouring innocent Americans out into the way up in the middle of the air. But, fortunately, these supposed officials further droned, America, it is prepared, to meet, and defeat, the underpants.

Where once America fought to "make the world safe for democracy," today, we were told, America fights like twelve three-fisted bastards, to cleanse all the globe, of the scourge, of terrorist underpants.

No. That America is under assault by underpants—that is something that is simply not Real. That is something out of one of Kurt Vonnegut's more buffoonish Kilgore Trout fantasies.

That the politics is in fact totally not Real, this became glow-in-the-dark manifest, in the person of George I.

First, there was this nutbaggery, after a US Navy warship blew an Iranian civilian airliner out of the sky:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10qatUWwIeg]

No even remotely Real political figure, would s/he ever emit, such balderdash. It's simply not conceivable.

Then, once he entered the Oval Office, and became George I, there was this famous address, wherein he brandished a big bag of crack cocaine (sound doesn't begin until 0:24):

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkyBfJfcIoM]

The exceedingly dark comedy, it then continued with George I's "son," George II.

Except it wasn't his son. For the real son, he had been killed in an unfortunate traffic accident. By his wife, Laura. Who has evinced a lifelong predilection for killing with her car men whom she had invited to place inside her their peni, but who had then greatly offended her. George II, one day he really pissed Laura off. And so she ran over his ass. And then she sucked up the remains, with a Kirby vacuum cleaner.

The Bush crime family, it convened in emergency session, and eventually agreed to call upon Andy Kaufman, who had recently faked his own death, and urge him to step in and replace the dead man. Kaufman, intrigued by the challenge, agreed. And thus, Andy Kaufman, playing the role of George II, was elected to the presidency. It was, by far, his greatest prank.

Occasionally, Kaufman would let the mask slip. As below, where he attempts to exit through a locked door. Note how, after the bonery, he stands with his hands rigidly at his sides, staring woodenly out at the audience. Classic Kaufman.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs-1jR9Ya0U]

The Science Men, meanwhile, they are constantly stretching and pulling and tugging at the Real as if it is taffy. Like, on the same day, announcing, first, that one-third of all the dinosaurs who ever existed, never existed at all; they had simply been "juveniles," who had been "misclassified." Then, that they had stumbled upon, there in the Antarctic, some 30,000 new sea creatures, many of whom had heretofore never been classified as Real or Existing at all. But now. They were. Real. Existing.

What is Real? What is not? What Exists? What does not?

Who knows?

The notion of existence: let’s face it: it becomes more malleable, with each day.

We know, for instance, that the sun does not exist. And, therefore, neither do we.

Some years ago arrived a communique from a person said to be conversant with the ways and means of alien beings. This person, while completing post-graduate work in psychic school, was one night orally apprised of the fact that, some time early on in the Clinton I administration, the sun went nova, and the earth was burnt to a cinder. However, no one on the planet noticed this, because of the efforts of the "good aliens" (the thinnish creatures best known for their attempts to protect the humans from the "bad aliens," those no-good-'uns prone to picking humans up off lonely interstates, playing with their gonads, implanting chips in their brains, and then setting them loose).

In this instance, the good aliens allowed the human brains to believe that the earth was still here—and so were they. They kindly threw up into the sky a Potemkin Sun, so that the humans could go on believing that everything was Normal. They did this, it is said, because during the Harmonic Convergence of August 1987, human beings apparently proved to be "worthy," and almost ready for "the next step," which involves not needing bodies. The good aliens figured it a shame to allow the humans all to burn off like bugs on a grill, and just a few short years before they would no longer be bothered by such things as roaring jets of molten flame. They will take down the Potemkin Sun, so goes the theory, when the humans no longer need it, when, one supposes, they will all sort of join together and swirl away as energy beings, a la the close of Childhood's End.

In the meantime: my advice: try to find the fun and the fine in it. As my deceased companero, the poet Jeffrey Miller, once put it:

were you ever driving at 3 in the morning down some 2 lane road in upstate new york & it was raining & the only thing you can get on the radio is some station out of memphis or someplace which comes in perfectly clear & plays great music like life is but a dream du wop du wop & you just turn it up & say to yourself "what the fuck, what the fuck?" well that's how i feel walking to the post office.

Which is why I really like what The Cranky Brooklyn Deli Man said about the messes.

"I think if they make the right choice and open the doors to working-class people and young people and create the kind of dynamism that the Democratic Party needs, it's going to be messy," Sanders said.

Asked if the convention could be problematical, Sanders said: "So what? Democracy is messy. Everyday my life is messy."

Absolutely goddam right. And just so. For there can be no form, without chaos. That's in the Chronicles Of Amber, too. And, if it is possible for dust mites to go "back to the ways of their ancestors by beginning to live independently," why would such not be possible, for the humans, too.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjVVjv92JzA]