Canto Thirty-Two – In the Main Flower Garden of the Bio-Dome
There were three large red-and-yellow blossoms on robust stalks in the center of the garden. Everything else was either withering and brown or completely dead. George Jetson felt slightly creeped out by the three giant, healthy plants in the center of so much death and rot. Still, he didn’t object as Brekka and Menolly danced and sang as they moved towards the bright colors of the three blossoms.
“Georgie? Why aren’t you dancing with us?” sang Brekka.
“Yeah, why not?” added Menolly.
“I don’t need to dance with goofy girls right now. I… I’m supposed to guard you and keep bad things from happening.”
The girl tadpoles scoffed and continued to dance towards the blossoms.
George watched the leaves of the flowers, easily the size of dinner plates, begin to twitch and move. It was almost as if they were trying to detect something either by feel, maybe of vibrations in the air, or possibly by smell. George knew from his educational programming that leaves had openings called “stoma” that sniffed the air as they breathed carbon dioxide in and oxygen out. It wasn’t an important fact, was it?
Suddenly there was a large, burly lizard man bursting in through the far door into the flower garden. He was completely naked, for reasons unknown. He was also obviously a scabby with the tell-tale white, filmy eyes and desiccated patches on his naked scales.
“George! Help!” cried Brekka. She had danced so far towards the three live flowers that the interrupting scabby had her cut off from Menolly and George. George leaped forward to engage the monster in hand-to-hand combat, but pulled up short when he noticed the huge teeth and long, scimitar-like claws on both hands.
“Brekka! Run away! We will catch up to you on the other side!” screamed George. “Menolly! Come here to me!”
Brekka broke toward the flowers and ran. The scabby followed her. Menolly reached George and threw both of her green arms around his neck, making him unable to either flee or fight. Both of them watched the pursuit of Brekka with absolute horror.
The largest of the three blossoms moved its huge flower-face closer to the fleeing Brekka. The four main petals of the blossom formed into two sets of opposing jaws. As Brekka moved close enough, the blossom engulfed her entire body and lifted her into the air. Her screams were muffled by the blossom that seemed much more like a gigantic mouth.
“Oh! No! Brekka is gone!” cried Menolly, sagging against George Jetson.
“It ate her!” George was too stunned to move.
The flowers were still in motion. The two remaining blossoms grabbed the scabby, one seizing its head, and the other grabbing a leg. The two blossoms pulled in opposite directions, splitting the unfortunate lizard man in two, then settling down to munch contentedly and smack their petal-lips.
Menolly was devastated and sobbing uncontrollably. George didn’t know an awful lot about the hugging and kissing stuff that Earth humans did on their television shows, but he felt the urge to try. He held Menolly tightly with both arms and pressed his mouth to hers.
“Mmmph! What are you doing?” Menolly moaned.
“I’m comforting you, dummy.”
“Well, don’t stop!”
When the blossom that had engulfed Brekka began making retching noises, George was almost too lost in the entire kissing thing to respond. He felt rather funny in his lower stomach as the two tadpoles pulled apart.
The blossom vomited Brekka onto the walkway. She was clearly still alive, but covered with sticky-looking goo.
“Ooh,” moaned Brekka, “that was not very fun.”
*****
If you are going to entertain a completely absurd notion like, “Shakespeare wasn’t really written by Shakespeare”, then you have to have some knowledge of the times and the context within which such a profoundly counter-intuitive thing could possibly be true. And it also helps to understand more precisely what the “writing of Shakespeare” actually means. Now, I know it is not particularly fair to confuse you, dear reader, right before I try to dazzle you with my complicated and over-thunk lackwit conspiracy theory, but that is, after all, what obfuscation actually means.
Catch a Falling Star 
Special Snowflakes
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
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