#813 Zest

I once heard that the key to a happy life is having a zest for living. An enthusiasm, a passion for everything you do. Now is the time of year in the great northwest where many of us finally feel that way.
It’s so much easier to feel zesty when you’re not in the middle of forty days of unrelenting gray skies with the sun going down at 4:30. The zest we feel now feels like passion, the zest we try to feel in the winter feels like dried orange peel crumbs.
Where do you think that came from? Grating tiny bits of citrus fruit peel and calling it zest.
It’s one of those singular/plural sorts of words too. Like fish and deer and moose. You don’t hear about a bunch of zests. There’s no such thing as one flake of zest.
It sounds like some strange, futuristic, distillation of feelings created by science. Instead of an anti-depressant, you take a capsule of zest.
Or, “I need to talk to my failing baseball team, can I have two tablets of anger please, and then you’d better give my an understanding pill for later.”
Feelings are funny things. Especially the sixth sense. Those feelings you get that someone’s watching. You just looked over your shoulder didn’t you? Be honest. Okay, you just snuck a look just then.
I know you did. It’s part of our vast psychic connection.
Like when someone in the room starts yawning. It’s hard to resist the urge. It’s hard even now, and I just mentioned yawning. Or if I say the word head lice. Feel like scratching? Go ahead.
We are connected by common experience. And now we are connected by the web too. Everyday countless millions of us go out on the World Wide Web together. Connected by wires to what will soon be a gigantic brain.
I’m plugged in. An evolved psychic for the 21st century. I have an even more attuned sense like the one when we feel someone is watching us.
I can tell when someone is googling me.
And it makes me feel zesty.
America, ya gotta love it.