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Easy with the Flower Juice There, Buddy

Sometimes everybody is in love with the wrong people and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

But why?

And why can't this situation be expedited? We live in an age and a society of capitalist comfort, where everything can be sped up with extra cash. So why can't we just bribe Puck to get us out of the sticky pickles everyone I know seems to be in at the moment?

I'm only thinking of the good of the community.

Why do people have hearts? What purpose do they serve, other than to inconvenience everyone and cause messes and break and require vast expensive resource allocation? Hearts are not necessary for any real thing that we do with other humans. You don't have to be in love to shoulder the burden of life together. You don't have to be in love to produce more baby humans. You don't have to be in love to have long talks about Life.

Their mysterious location between the head and the genitals might be part of the problem. Nobody is quite sure what to do with them...which may be why we are all generally ham-fisted and clumsy, with our own and with everyone else's.

Some days you just wake up and everybody is doing A Midsummer Night's Dream and that's just how it is and you all have to wait it out until finally it's Act V and everyone has ironed out their mess.

But while we're all half-laughing-half-mooning because Puck dropped magic flower juice in every single wrong eye from here to Kathmandu and everyone's wishing he could hurry up and squeeze everybody a little antidote, let's take a step back and think about the actual play. Why not let life imitate art. Think about the lovers...each one so distinct...so memorable...each story utterly unique....

Neither do I.

We love to laugh at Midsummer because the lovers are completely interchangeable! Who can tell the difference between any of them? Nobody in the audience ever can. One fool in love is the same as any other. If Puck can't tell the difference between any of them, why should they bother to tell the differences between themselves? It's all a big quilombo, a moon-eyed miasma of silliness and unnecessary drama. Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, Helena, who cares? Can't everyone just go with the one nearest them on the grassy hillock and call it a night and be happy?

Personal preference is a mess and a mystery and life would be a heck of a lot easier for everyone if it didn't exist.

But if it didn't exist...then we would not have art.

So perhaps hearts were created so that artists would have something to talk about. The mess and trouble they cause is justified by the pearls we create around their trials. The inconvenience is a prompt to humanity to create culture.

Why not.

While we're all waiting for Puck to hurry his little fairy heinie up.