GETTING BETTER

I don't know why or what it is, but I just keep getting better. More intelligent. More attractive. More dashing. More...amazing.

Girl. You know it's true.

Some have been tempted to describe this process through cliched simile: "like a fine wine, the American Mastodon gets better with age". Although true, this statement does not wholly encompass the man that I am, and contine to be. For, unlike the seedling in the ground, the withered grape on the vine, or the mashed juice in oaken barrels, there never was a time where my existence could be argued to have been inconsequential or disposable. In this regard, a more appropriate analogy would be to the element carbon.

In other words, in my most basic and elementary form, I provide life. Indeed, I provide the environment in which life can flourish. Then, I fill it.

Add some pressure to me. Go ahead. Throw at me your troubles, your travails, your boulders, your intense heat, your endless eons of shifting contintents and pounding waves of water. Be my guest. Because you know what? Congratulations, you've just made coal. A substance to heat the world, give it light, give it energy, make it move. First I give you life. Then I give you life.

But I wasn't happy being a few simple atoms to usher your lifeless form into the world of the living, nor was I ecstatic as you excavated me from underground tombs and shoveled me haphazardly into a train's engine. No, I always knew that I was more than that, and now I am. I am a shining diamond, formed through the breathtaking and explosive phenomena known as kimberlite.

Oops. Sorry to drop all that science on you like that. I didn't hurt your toes, did I?

The unwashed and ignorant among you may no doubt ask yourselves the meaning and significance of this word "kimberlite". Well, as perhaps one of you knows, it is the action that forms kimberlite pipes, and gives me endless life. Imagine if you will an incredible force building and gaining energy deep in the loins of the earth. Suddenly, at its climaxxx, a ball of hot and gooey magma is released from the earth's interior shelf, shooting upward through the thin mantle above, burning a hole through the crust and eventually, wonderfully, shooting its hot wad into the sky above. The residual magma remaining in the now empty shaft quickly cools: since the magma contains new elements that are comprised differently than those found in objects on the earth's surface, the strange substances dry and crytallize into fascinating shapes. Much carbon is churned up through this process, and the heat and force of the kimberlite makes these pipes an ideal environment to find, among other things, an endless procession of perfectly formed diamonds.

Since the interior of the pipe is often made of softer materials than the surrounding earth, the pipes often get covered deep beneath the earth's surface after many years, or are hidden under seemingly normal and placid lakes. Those who know me well know that I have a theory as to where some of these larger and more promising pipes may be. And, since I myself am a sparkling diamond, wouldn't you also take it as faith that I have a not uneducated idea as to where they might be?

Follow your heart, they always say. Well, I know where my heart lies. It beats inside of me always. And the beating says to me, in its confident whisper, "Keep on shining, keep on shining, keep on shining..."


Gaia shoots his hot wad all over Mother Earth, and life begins anew.