I don’t remember the first time my astrological sign was shared and explained. I am a Gemini and we are split in some manner, which can result in internal conversations between ourselves. In my case, it’s not really a dialogue, which I guess could make me a functioning schizophrenic, carried to an extreme. I talk and listen at the same time, but it doesn’t feel like two halves, just me, talking to myself. It has been this way for as long as I can remember. It is hard to tell when I am deep in conversation, because there aren’t any outward signs, but the motor is usually running.

Now, before you start thinking I am a closet whacko, please hold that thought. It is really not as bad as it sounds. My mind is always allowing, like a leaky shower you have to twist hard to the right. I just allow it to flow, as long as it doesn’t make that torturous, dripping sound that eventually graduates to shouts, screaming cannon balls, slamming into my fortress walls. I have always wondered about the rest of you. There are times when I could be having a very animated conversation with someone else, simultaneously having a whole separate party between my ears, audible only to the listening half.

I have a terrible example of the mental juggling act many of us engage in, with an outside dialogue and an inside monolog. It has to do with sex, a subject that is now never more than one story away from the daily headline.

I want you to work with me here. Let’s say you are a very successful architect and one of the outstanding women in your firm, having been made partner the month before. You are introduced to Kevin, a fabulously wealthy client, who wants to erect, be careful, an office tower in midtown Manhattan. You begin a very engaging conversation. You happen to notice a bulge in his pants, when he shifts his weight from one side to the other, relaxing in your Louis the XV wing chair. You are damn well capable of talking about the huge midtown erection, while you secretly dangle his erection in your imagination. Right?

This is precisely where we trip over the hormonal wire, often invisibly stretched at ankle height right across our path. Most animals and vegetables pollinate and it usually doesn’t piss of the robin or the anaconda or the cabbage. No matter how much we want to act on impulse, it’s a messy business, because we are actually supposed to consider the other person. Harvey and Donald’s behavior is symptomatic of how power and wealth engorge us with a blind self-indulgence, making everyone else their prey.

I love when our behavior is analyzed as if we are not human beings. One of the hard calls with the Buddha and the Christ and the rest of their team is that we have to love our enemies. Unlike every other goddamn species, including all varieties of rocks, we are NOT perfect. Our mind is our greatest strength and our enemy for all time. Harvey has damaged so many women. I don’t know how he had any time to make movies, while getting in and out of the shower, in and out of his bathrobe, managing to whack it at will. Like Donny, this is a guy who is drowning in his inadequacies and he will stand on anyone’s shoulders, including his children’s, to make sure he is seen and worshipped. They are truly pathetic men.

There is so much I simply don’t understand. I have been speaking myself for decades and I’ve never been deluded into thinking there are answers, even as a child. From the time i was nine, asking myself why my father died, until this afternoon, over six decades later, I realize the answers don’t exist and they’re not important anyway. I am always asking myself Why, whether relating to my own stupid behavior or wondering if there is any purpose at all to anything.

The only reason I am writing this is because I find myself asking Why more than ever before. All this time, I have been quietly talking to myself and now, here I am, with a buttload of rings around my trunk. I wonder if there is any meaning to my life, or if it was ever supposed to have any.

What is the purpose of a robin? Barring getting hit by a car or chewed by someone’s special cat, the robin goes about his/her business and life is good. I swear I have been thinking about why we are here? Historically, it seems we have been here to beat the shit out of each other, sucking up power, now perversely personified by Donny and his Twittering, masturbatory pronouncements.

Longevity has pushed my questioning to the ultimate precipice. I have to think how to say this without channeling the Dude from The Big Lebowski, a movie I could see as often as I can listen to Rhapsody in Blue, with Lenny Bernstein. If Superman shot an arrow into the sky, how far would it travel until it reached the end of all space? If infinity is a measurement of some kind, what is the mileage, mother-fucker?

Why? I Dunno.