So, uh, I was sitting here drinking green Kool-Ade and I wondered who invented colors. For real, though. Who was the first person to be all, "That's gonna be 'red,' bitch," the first person to articulate the spectrum? It must have sucked to be that guy, since he had to teach the entire rest of the world about colors.

But there were only three primary colors, and did we know that right away? How would one go about explaining the mixed colors, of which there are considerably more than three? I'm going to feel dumb if someone sends me an e-mail all "God invented colors, dumbass" and quotes me chapter and verse, but I've been through so many years of painstaking religious instruction that I can regurgitate the story of Ruth word for word backwards in my sleep, and I don't remember anything about God inventing colors. Plants, animals, people, gardening? I remember all of that. Colors? Not ringing a bell.

Maybe that's because colors are a heathen invention, like in that movie, Pleasantville. The world was boring and safe in black and white until someone did something profound (I think; I only saw the movie once, on cable, a long-ass time ago) and the world was no longer boring and safe, but it was in color. I'm glad that someone came up with the concept of color, though, because a lot of things would totally suck in black and white.

Rainbows, for example, would blow. And tye-dye T-shirts, but those are suspect anyway. Entire industries would shut down if we didn't have color. Without red, blue and yellow, Play-Doh is just dirt for rich people. And Crayola would be totally fucked were it not for colors. Yes, crayons are nice, but I think they might have trouble developing and marketing a box of 128 shades of gray. They'd get down to the bottom of the barrel with names like "Industrial Furnace," "The Side of the CD You're Not Supposed to Touch," and "Bottom of the Barrel." The kids'll be all over that shit, I tells ya.

Of course, all it takes is one episode of Trading Spaces and Hildy painting some room vomit green for you to change your position to anti-color, but if you get too far down that road, before you know it it's the fifties and you're walking with your dad to the fishing pond and humming some lameass song that doesn't have words. There are plenty of cases that can be made against color (purple polka dots, yellow houses, Star Jones), but taking away the world's color would be censorship. Not that anyone could actually take away the color in our lives -- at least, no one can take the color from anyone's life but his or her own. Be boring, but be warned: standing in prison stripes next to a convention full of Cher impersonators is going to get you lost in a crowd. Plus, horizontal stripes make you look fat, so prison stripes shouldn't be in your wardrobe anyway.

It's like, how many different shades of blue are there? How many thousands of ways can you combine colors to come out with something in the blue family? Skies, birds, rivers, fish, jeans, balls (hee; obviously I'm not above that), buildings at sunset, flags -- all blue. A world full of color, and me, a tiny little insignificant part of it all. So easy to get swept in, swept up, swept away.

I find myself lost in thought more and more these days. It's hot outside, so hot that sometimes the only thing you can do is lie around and think about ridiculously simple life components. It's comforting to evaluate the little things that make up what life is. How ridiculous is it that I just wrote 700 words on the concept of colors (and that you read it)? But the mind wanders where it wanders, I guess, and it doesn't hurt that I take one less thing for granted. Because we're all going to die, eventually, and of all the things there are to appreciate, colors are the most universal because colors are everywhere. Unless you're colorblind, in which case, sucks for you.

Reading: Just finished To the Nines. Evanovich is always a quick and dirty read, just the way I like it. Now on to Skipping Towards Gomorrah. Watching: Legally Blonde 2. Only in Hollywood could Sally Field be a senator. Listening to: The Dawson's Creek soundtrack. Eating: Swedish Fish. Surfing: Shouted Whispers, our new community weblog.