Preface To What Is Life?: Is This Life?

Here's a picture.  Is this life?

It is not.  It's a salt shaker, but without salt.  I found the image on the Bed, Bath, & Betrayal website.  I think they might be afraid that, if the image were shown with salt, the customer would expect the shaker to come pre-filled with salt.

Do you remember when salt was extremely expensive?  You do?  You must've been born a long time ago.  Because it's been pretty cheap for a while now.  I know it hasn't always been cheap.  But it's not like you lived in India during the Salt March.  Or did you?

Anyway, while salt is essential to life I can assert that it's not life itself.  This is not to diminish in any way, shape, or form, the greatness of iodine, an essential nutrient.  Nor is iodine life, at least not life as we know it.  Hear me out.  I have reason to suspect - the evidence is mostly anecdotal but in my defense it's anecdotes beamed into my brain from another planet, called Sashabroom, which is somewhere near Betelgeuse - I have reason to suspect that right under our noses there's an entirely new lifeform which we call "iodine" which has been secretly entering our bodies & making us susceptible to alien suggestions.  This is not something I'm supposed to talk about so please ignore this paragraph & pretend there's a - well - I dunno - maybe a pepper shaker here?  But it will be empty, of course, because I don't want you believing that it comes pre-filled with pepper.

This concludes what I hope was an edifying lesson.  But it's only the beginning.  For most of the rest of tonight & well into the weekend, I'd like you to stop people whom you pass, point to something, & ask, "Is this life?"  You will soon get a more or less strong sense of what is & is not life.  Point to things at random!  Don't just point at people!  If it turns out they're not life, they're going to be quite offended.  Same with bees.

But it's cold now so the bees are vacationing in the tropics, so perhaps point at a bee, if you see a bee.  I don't think any bees who are working while their sisters are on vacation will mind.

Oh my look at the time.  Really, look at the time.  Do you see?  Is this life?