Friday, September 28, 2012

Frankenstein or Humpty Dumpty?

“A Renaissance man is one who is knowledgeable, educated, and proficient in a wide range of fields. The concept emerged from the numerous great thinkers of a previous era who excelled in multiple fields of the arts and science, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Francis Bacon.”  Clearly, this definition is an embodiment of the treasures of the mind, rather than the attributes of the body.  It was undoubtedly made possible through the quantitative limitations in knowledge for the time; one can only imagine what a genius it would take to qualify for this title in 2012.  

As important a revelation of the capacity and powers of the mind and intellect in its personification of the Renaissance Man, and as a result of invention and creativity germinating from such genius, we have focused considerable attention on correcting, protecting, altering, refining and beautifying the neural and non-neural containing interior and exterior of man. We now have the capacity to reassemble or more correctly reconfigure humans to the greatest extent possible, both for noble and ignoble  causes. Be all you can physically be…..be anything or anyone you want to be!   


Almost anything, but you can’t change man’s height.  Think again….human growth hormone will do the trick even after you have stretched yourself to the limit.  Human growth hormone performs other tricks to make you strong and look young.  Male hormones and steroids enhance performance and strength.  Other drugs make you feel you have the power and insight and strength you really do not possess.  Some drugs make you sleep, others keep you awake, some make you happy and some make you depressed.

Noble or Ignoble? Hair is portable, skin can be tucked, lightened, softened, scraped, stretched; ears flattened and/or re-sized; noses squished or shrunken or reshaped; mouths made more fleshy; redundant eye tissue wedged; wrinkles paralyzed; lax layers of neck tissue removed.  The face is easy, and so is the rest of the body.

Noble or Ignoble? Bad knees, hip, arm, hand, anything is replaceable......(at least to some extent - great advances in medicine, surgery and rehab have saved the lives of countless victims of war, and in the treatment of chronic conditions like advanced diabetes) 

Need a new kidney, pancreas, intestine, lung, heart, or liver....well you have to wait your turn and hope for the best, but with enough money and influence you may be able to wiggle up higher on the list than you deserve.  I realize that no one would choose to have a new kidney, etc, and so these organs replacements are not the folly of some egotistical mind, but rather a formative life saving procedure.


Noble or Ignoble? Want bigger boobs, or smaller boobs…either for men or women..yes, pec implants for men are out there, remove fat from the area of the spare tire, from the butt or the thighs, or add fat to the butt, anything you want to do that will make you look like the next anonymous beautiful person.  No need to diet, surgery is much more efficient. Don’t fret or worry. Just open up your pocket book, and body parts will flow like milk; to be - redistributed, reshaped, removed, replaced…anything is possible as you become transfigured into a modern day Frankenstein or put back together unlike Humpty Dumpty.  But also unlike Frankenstein who had no choice in the matter of his body parts, you can choose anything to go anywhere including your genitals.  Want a penis and what about a vagina?  Want to be a man, OK, want to be a woman, OK too…your choice…fu… Watson and Crick.


Eat too much….too much for regional surgery to handle, simple, shrink the stomach with a gastric bypass.  No need to worry about will power and dieting and exercising and dieting and exercising and dieting….. (Now, I’m not directing this to those genetically determined overweight or obese humans who want nothing more than to be thinner and healthier and for whom gastric bypass is life saving…)

No worries as the Aussies say - eat what you want and we will fix things later.  Make sure they supersize your servings, or better yet, go to my favorite all you can eat buffet and plan to stay for a several hours.

Like fat…no worries, eat fat.  Your prostate is hungry for it; your breasts will horde it; your colon needs it as nourishment to grow its cancer budding polyps; your brain needs it to kill some cells to slow you down and lose those bad memories.  And your blood vessels can stand any amount of fat….cause Pfizer discovered Vitamin L.

Lipitor is Vitamin L.  Every doctor serves Vitamin L like candy.  Thirty million Americans or maybe it’s more; big bucks to big pharma.  Not only does Vitamin L reduce heart attacks by lowering cholesterol but also by reducing inflammation in the blood vessels.  Ah, there are so many reasons to take Lipitor, most doctors think that everyone should be on it. No worries; small chances that Lipitor will cause muscle pain (??40%), liver disease, memory loss, cancer, Parkinson’s, and death.  The list gets longer the longer we experiment with vitamin L.

For me, vitamin L allows me to eat what I want when I want.  No longer do I need to discipline myself, eat what is good for my body or anything that causes me anguish.  No worries, I could get run over by a car, so live life to its fullest.  


But it doesn't end there...there are drugs for everything....and big dollars to be made by big pharma in the process.  Want more hair, want more sex with a quick responding tool, want to be treated for depression, want to sleep better, want to be more alert, less alert, anything is possible if you look hard enough and find the right drug.  And if its not found through your doctor, go to Longs and look for natural products that boast results that would be wonderful if they were not  so outrageous.  And if you can't find it at Longs, go to Mexico and you will find it there for a few pesos.


And when all else fails, return back to your happy surgeon and order the next makeover. You might even be made invisible in your next transformation erasing evidence of the nefarious life you have lived while at the same time giving you a new start!

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So, I have a question for myself.

In the end, what is left of me or you if every aspect of what I was or who I am can be changed, edited like a document, exterior beautified like a new coat of paint on an aging car after the dents have been fixed, blood vessels that can cleaned like the grime removed from drain pipes under your sink, organs replaced as easy as buying a new refrigerator, will power and individual initiative replaced or controlled by drugs that are as well thought out and studied as a child mixing chemicals playing with his chemistry set.  

What do we create by altering the exterior, adjusting the mind to new set points and highs and lows, and replacing failed body parts with new ones from other living (or more correctly dying) creatures.  Are we then a new creature, formed from the skeleton of the past....or maybe we are a hybrid creature of sorts?  Or are we still us....the same creature cloaked in new linings and reshaped to satisfy our craving for mirror satisfaction.........but really inside, without the mirror, we are the same identical miserable being we were before we made surgeons and medical practitioner richer and big pharma more profitable?

Humm, maybe I'm more like Frankenstein than I realize because to do all of these things to me would really totally destroy who I WAS.  And if that were so, the newly created me would never know who I used to be.  What  I am now is an entirely newly created being, so the me of the past and the me of the present would never collide.  My God, there is no way of putting Humpty back together again, only of killing me off and bringing me back to life as Frankenstein. 


Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.


You will undoubtedly ask yourself what drug I was on when I wrote this bantering essay.  To this question I have no response.

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