Blood

What does blood do all day? And what has it got to do with me?

Every day approximately 1.5 gallons of blood circulate through the veins and arteries and capillaries of my body.

Fine. But what does it do?

Blood brings oxygen and iron to the places where oxygen and iron are needed. Like the lungs. Like just about everywhere. Muscles, organs, cuticles, guts.

Blood is pumped by the heart, which is a large muscle, swelling and contracting in the center of the chest cavity, just to the left. Lub dub, lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.

If the heart stops, you’re in big trouble. If the skin breaks, and the blood runs out, you’ve basically got a mess. Have you seen the scene in Limitless after Eddie Mora stabs Gennady and Gennady falls dead to the floor and his blood starts oozing out from under his body onto the hardwood floor of Eddie Mora’s superexpensive Manhattan penthouse and Eddie, who is lying next to Gennady in a state of exhaustion, gets the idea of drinking Gennady’s blood because it contains the drug that makes you super smart and able to make connections at lightning speed and get yourself out of dangerous situations by quickly reading all the available possibilities?

Blood, as  it turns out, is also extremely photogenic. Because it’s so red. So deeply, deeply red.

There are, not surprisingly, many movies with blood in the title. Blood Alley. Blood Beach. Blood Brothers. Blood Castle. Blood Dolls. Blood Frenzy. Blood Money. Blood Moon. Blood of a Poet. Blood of the Innocent. Blood Relations. Blood Simple.

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain, says Walt Whitman.

Or said Walt Whitman when he had blood running in his veins.

It inspires me to think of ink as blood. Ink is the blood making Walt Whitman’s words have life in them. Though they could exist as pixels on a computer screen. In which case the metaphor could be transferred to electricity instead of ink. But it’s so much easier to think of ink as blood. Damn computers. They mess up everything. Because they don’t’have blood  in them.

Have you ever met someone who seemed to have circuits instead of blood? I’m sure you have. I know I have. I live in Seattle, home of Microsoft and Amazon. Need I say more?