Synthetic Chain of Being

I just finished Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932). This is a must-read. I don't see it as prophetic in the literal sense but I do see it as a powerful and prescient metaphor for some aspects of the human experience in Western civilization, specifically the U.S. We do love our bread and circus, not to mention antidepressants. I find it amusing that there is actually a very commonly prescribed drug currently in use called Soma (generic name Carisoprodol), which is a sedative and skeletal muscle relaxant with anxiolytic properties as well. I am amused by the audacity of the drug developer...the joke is on everyone who hasn't read BNW, apparently.

Meanwhile I could use a Soma holiday (the fictional Soma) while this nasty cold (or allergy attack?) works its way out of my system. I've never had full blown allergies but apparently January is peak Cedar allergy time. I hear it is really bad. I feel it, too. I started taking Claritin-D, which caused me to have bizarre nightmares and to become extremely irritable. For example, see the following conversation I had with my husband about 45 minutes ago:

I am reading the encyclopedia while eating some microwaved spicy Thai soup and rice. My husband is in the kitchen making his own dinner.

"I would like to travel to Maine someday," I quipped after reading about Winslow Homer in the H encyclopedia (an American watercolorist and oil painter who spent a lot of his life in Maine where he painted seascapes and the like).

"Why?" My husband's question seemed to have a tone that implied that there couldn't possibly be a reason why I'd want to go to Maine.

"Because I've heard it's beautiful and I want to go there. To see the coast. The whole state. Why wouldn't I want to go?"

"Well, ok..." He was clearly bewildered by the hostility in my tone upon responding.

I then told him that it must be the Claritin-D. I had visited an online forum earlier in the day to see if other people had had bizarre nightmares while taking it, which, apparently, many had. I also read about everything from hallucinations to losing girlfriends to feeling like a zombie to hands itching and on and on and on.

Ok, so I got off topic. I read a lot of reviews people had written on BNW and I sense that people feel a bit obligated to say how it scared them and how we're headed in that direction. Crap, if we are then I hope to be an alpha who gets to go live in the tropics with other "individuals" as a "punishment" for being antisocial, aka willing to take my lumps in order to feel (and not at the "feelies"). Ah, well. I think we're pretty far off from such a utopia/dystopia scenario and are more likely to see such scary things as bioterrorist attacks on our soil than we are to start decanting our progeny. Not that there aren't lots of ethically murky scientific developments on the horizon, but BNW is not exactly the direction in which we are headed. Again, a great read, a must-read nonetheless.