Catalyst or Catastrophe
by Steve Watters When I was a kid, I had an electric racetrack. I’d line up my racecars in the little track grooves and zoom them around the track over and over again. After a while, I got bored with just circling the track. I took the track apart and built ramps. At the bottom of the ramp, I would hold a car in place, letting the engine rev a little and watching the tires spin before releasing it and watching it fly over the ramp. Sometimes the car would land safely, but often it would fly off and hit my bed or dresser and get banged up. What ultimately totaled my racecars, however, was the way I was holding them in place while the engine was running. I didn’t realize that was stripping the gears. The car wasn’t meant to be held in place while its engine ran. It was supposed to go somewhere. I thought about that old racetrack recently in the context of romantic love — a powerful force driven by the twin engines of a desire for companionship and the sex drive. This f