OBSERVING BLUE

The alien had never seen blue and that’s why it came here.

It knew, as a matter of fact, there’s very little blue in the universe and yet

this one place was covered with it. Some might ask why?

But the alien didn’t ask such questions. It didn’t think like that.

It was more interested in observing than thinking.

It knew thinking stopped the process of observing.

In the alien’s experience, it always knew more when it simply observed

and by knowing more it then made better choices of what to observe.

One thing the alien liked best about observing was unintended consequences.

The main thing unintended was how much more it discovered

than it ever imagined it would when it simply observed completely.

And the trip to Earth to see blue did not disappoint in that regard.

The alien was astounded to find so much more than blue to look at while here.

It knew that observing anything closer brought out more detail, and so it came near.

The nearer it got, the more it found. The more it found, the more it observed.

The more it observed, the closer it came. The closer it came, the more amazed it was.

It scanned for local concepts to match all the newness it saw.

It discovered mountains and buildings and tigers and airplanes,

it absorbed the notion of submarines and lawnmowers and diet pills and handguns,

it amazed at placentas and mitochondria and phlegm and apoptosis,

it encountered butter and balloons and ballerinas and buses, 

it perceived cascading style sheets and trestles and wing nuts and tee-pees,

it realized plasma and coral and bungee-cords and emojis,

it detected volcanoes and crystals and rainbows, and so much more.

Even with the alien’s advanced powers of observation, this was a lot to fathom.

And then the alien scanned something quite peculiar.

This thing was universally used by the planet’s dominate species of life

and yet despite being ubiquitous, this something was malleable to the extreme.

There was no one concept or use for it. Everyone took it to mean something different.

Everyone applied the concept in a way that suited them best despite

what others felt it meant or even what they told others it meant to them.

This thing promised to be something to behold, much more interesting than blue.

But beholding this thing was a problem. It had so many uses and definitions.

It couldn’t be seen or measured or transported in the alien’s spacecraft.

The alien could only observe this through the experience of the planet’s dominant species.

As such, it was an anomaly, something taken to be so meaningful or useful,

so universally known, and yet so disparate in its scope, application, and power. 

At any given time it could be purpose, influence, feeling, leverage, concern, manipulation,

devotion, desire, beguilement, attachment, or reproduction, and so much more.

The alien needed to observe more of this thing called love.

The alien swept the planet, gathering billions of impressions,

sampling every which way how this thing called love got manifested.

It was strange to observe how much of what happened on the blue planet 

was entirely immaterial, existing nowhere but in transient energy patterns called

thought and feeling, all of which ebbed and flowed with no certain justification.

The alien observed beliefs and behavior, deliberate motives and subconscious intentions, 

sincerity and pretense, all of which had instantaneous valences, values that often changed

in a moment. The alien saw how these creatures called people could say one thing 

and think another while feeling something else. It was amazed how the agitated substrate 

of this immaterial energy played out as a fascinating but perplexing puzzle, 

particularly when it came to love. Incredibly, love was not one thing,

and not for one purpose only. There was self love, familial love, philial love, unrequited love,

agape love, affectionate love, romantic love, sexual love, obsessive love, even love of country.

At times, without objective evidence, love was qualified as true love which implied 

there existed love that wasn’t true. True love to some was unconditional love 

and yet true lovers had to make conditional vows to each other to ensure 

their love was true and lasting. These vows sanctified their copulation henceforth 

as exclusive and special while negating all copulation with others before the vows 

as unimportant to the vows. This thing called love could be offered to another 

in pretense before the vows in order to achieve a willingness to copulate, 

then love could fade once the copulation act was done and no vows were necessary. 

Love could be inspirational, philosophical, hormonal, situational, universal, specific,

and exclusive vows of forever love in the present didn’t by necessity erase the forever love 

promised to others in the past, since it was totally fine to hold the past love in one’s heart 

even as one vowed exclusive love to another in the present. Romantic love could 

“sweep one off one’s feet” and oxytocin effects could create a delusional pair-bond 

which, when faded, revealed true incompatibilities and a mirage of love.

The vows of unconditional love didn’t require continuing to love if an affair 

broke the vows of fidelity. Brotherly love, universal love, all you need is love, 

God is love and everyone is a part of God, love conquers all made no difference 

if the vows to be exclusive with one’s genitals after a short ceremony were trammeled

by a single sexual liaison with another outside the vows. Sex with someone else 

in the present was unforgivable and hurtful and the worst betrayal because 

one’s genitals were conditionally promised to only one, even if those same genitals

had been shared many times with others before the promise. 

Love connected to sexual exclusivity only mattered in the present. 

One could experience as many love-sexual exclusivities as one wanted 

just as long as, for the sake of love, one reserved the genitals in line with current vows.

Some didn’t need vows to establish this exclusivity and relied on a civil contract instead.

Others eschewed vows and contracts and relied on person-to-person promises

which were only statements in the present that could be true for now but 

might change at any time for any reason deemed true subjectively.

Even lifetime vows and contracts were easily erased via the correct bureaucratic channels

and exclusive rights to one's genitals could be rented by the hour without love.

Love and intimacy were intricately linked but sex and love didn't have to be

but sex was linked to the exclusive vow of unconditional love,

and one who rented their genitals may not want to kiss their client

because kissing would be too intimate whereas

the sharing of genitals would not be,

but the act itself was often called making love.

The alien found it hard to settle on a consistent view of everything observed 

when it came to love. In some places on the planet, a person could romantically love 

someone as soon as they gained eighteen years of maturity, but not a day sooner.

In other places the age was sixteen, and there were places with even lower ages.

Loving them earlier was a crime. Loving too early or loving the wrong sex could be crimes, 

but not each place on the planet agreed about these crimes. Some people believed 

crimes of love meant eternal damnation after a person died and yet those who preached 

this policy were often just as guilty of these crimes. It was not a crime for a male

to be lovingly attracted to a female of the species, but if a male over a certain age 

was attracted to a younger female, that male was guilty of being a pervert, even though

younger males could express the same prurient interest and that would be flattering.

Older females were also disparaged if they found younger men lovingly attractive, 

but a younger woman finding the same man lovingly attractive was expected.

Some places allowed the same sex to love, others did not. Many people didn’t know

which gender they preferred since they saw themselves as both and any which way

they identified that day determined who must be attracted lovingly to them or else 

that person would be hated for not loving them, and hate was the opposite of love.

Other people said the only way to end hate was through love, but if you didn’t love

the way they wanted, then you would be hated. Even if you still had male genitals,

if you identified as female then those around you attracted to females needed to be

attracted to you. For some reason, unconditional love could not be exempt from the 

conditions of proper age and orientation, and of course children could only be loved 

one way, a platonic way, but not all ways, otherwise that was a crime and sin too.

People were encourage to love their neighbor but only some kinds of love

were permitted. A ritual day was even enshrined on the calendar devoted to love

and yet most actions taken on that day were dictated by commercial convention

aimed at profit and exclusively directed to only one kind of love, romantic love.

Why the day dedicated to love should only be about romance was unclear

since the other kinds of love were said to be held in equal or higher esteem.

People set up organizations to spread universal love but spent a great deal of time

calculating how much profit they would garner from it and hated those people

who interfered as competition for them. People presented

themselves as persons of love and drew large followings to hear the message of love

but they orchestrated ever more sophisticated ways to receive donations all the while 

they convinced some followers that heavenly love meant sexual love with them.

Even motherly love had a pathological side when smothering mothering

prevented the offspring from maturing. One thing was sure, virtually

everyone said they knew what love meant and used the word when it suited them.

Billions of these people still loved the Son of God, the ultimate example of incarnate love,

who, when he came to Earth, was promptly tortured and killed by a world 

full of people striving for love.

All of this was quite confusing for the alien, yet most interesting.

Here was a planet of unique and rare blue, a place unlike any other in the universe,

a remarkable oasis, a special gem of wonder where blue provided an aqueous medium 

from which a profusion of life had sprung forth in a myriad of creative expressions.

One dominant species ruled the planet by creating its own plenitude of devices

which people loved and obsessed over, and yet the alien observed a hungry restlessness 

and madness of conscious intent among this group. 

The alien didn’t think, it learned by observing, and it saw clearly that these people 

did not live in the blue, they could only live in places that weren’t blue,

and yet they fed off life in the blue. The alien could see where they were headed

and it wasn’t going to turn out well for them. Everywhere the alien looked it witnessed 

the massive confusion people had over their concept of love. It was obvious this concept 

was their attempt to self-correct their madness, and yet in their race to use love

for any and every purpose anyone had, ultimately they only managed to turn love itself mad.

The alien zapped its spacecraft out to the moon, a place without blue, without people,

without scrambled confusion and desperate emotion, without the enigma of love. 

The alien pulled back its wide-field scan, letting all but one observation subside.

It settled within itself and beheld the rare pearl of blue, the place that madness called Earth.

The experience of observing here was full of unintended consequences, 

and so the alien was pleased. But observing blue was what the alien came for 

and it knew blue would suffice. Everything else, the alien observed, 

was unsustainable.