After a bicycle ride recently I headed to the RV park's shower-hut to scrape off sweat and crisco and to restoreth my soul. I emerged to find a sky clouded over, but still cheery. In May, that is almost impossible in the desert Southwest.

My glance --unprotected by the usual welding goggles-- went upwards to the sky. Under normal circumstances my face would freeze into a grimace, and my eyes would constrict into a painful squint. But at this moment it seemed as if Kindliness and Gentleness flew down on softly-flapping wings to catch my ascending glance in mid-flight. The glance didn't even seem connected to the rest of my body.

Every square inch of my skin felt soothed by an anesthetic unguent. My skin guzzled moisture --that rarest of luxuries-- out of the air. I literally sighed when a gentle breeze tickled my skin.

It's OK for the reader to smile at this endorphin-induced epiphany. Years ago I learned to be uninhibited when anthropomorphizing. It is one of the tricks of the trade for a serious outdoorsman, as is the trick of migrating away from an over-reliance on the eyes. Sometimes it seems as if the skin is my main sensory organ. 

Normally sensual pleasure is not intense unless it is preceded by pain or at least appetite. But that hadn't happened here. In defiance of the Pessimists, like Schopenhauer, the pleasure seemed to have an existence that was independent of a contradistinction with pain.
Something about this experience reminded me of an episode ("This Side of Paradise") in the original Star Trek series, which you can watch for free on Hulu, and close to free on Netflix. The Enterprises's landing party put down on a planet that had been settled by agricultural colonists.

One by one, members of the Enterprise's landing party were smitten by an exotic plant that expectorated a fog of spores into their face, which caused them to act dopey, lovey-dovey, and fluffy-duffy. Even Mr. Spock was affected, and of all things, he got kissie-faced with a (human!) female colonist on this strange planet.

Captain Kirk had been drugged by the spores, too. But he found that intense emotions, like an affection for his ship, broke the spell of the spores over his mind. Then he used that technique to liberate everybody on the planet from their drug-induced paradise. I thought this was an excellent sci-fi fable alluding to the contemporary drug culture of the late Sixties.

Mr. Spock was glad to be back in Spock mode again but he had to admit that, for the first time in his life, he had been truly happy. Perhaps he had been affected by the drug more than others because he had fewer alternative sources of happiness in his stern Vulcan life.

Maybe this partially explains why a crabby ol' Boonie, full of his sarcasm, misanthropy, and weltschmerz, is so addicted to the spores of cycling.