Dezzo Erasmus and the Brekkie Bong

Good to see the questions are starting to flow in! I now have small backlog of juicy personal dilemmas, creative quandaries, and the odd curve-ball designed to try and trip me up (obviously posed by buffoons who haven't seen me star-jump in six-inch heels.

Today we've got a quirky little query from a high-flying Canberra exec, who, I must say is in possession of a rather wonderful rack. She asks:

'Why is the grass always greener, even when we know it's poisonous?'

Well, I was going to point out that the answer to this question should be easy to find for a Canberra lass -- simply visit Sinnish at number 144 Bernie Court, Woden, and he'll be able to answer that for you, over a couple of bubbling hot bongs. Then I remembered they razed Bernie Court and all the former residents are either living in Charnwood, or they've gone straight-edge and are now working at the Department of Odd Socks and Bobble-ends.

Canberra specific humour aside, I thought it best to trace the origin of the saying, 'the grass is always greener on the other side.'

Turns out, we've known this since the 15th Century. A chap by the name of Desiderius Erasmus said it first, and it seems we haven't learnt much since. Erasmus was a Dutch Catholic Renaissance scholar who had it in for Martin Luther in a pretty big way. He dropped the first name 'Desiderius' after he got properly pissed at the tavern one night and picked up the nickname 'Dezzo' (which has now found its way into Antipodean vernacular as another form of 'Derro' or 'Derelict).

Dezzo...er I mean Erasmus, wrote a whole host of tomes in addition to his bite-size proverbs, including a lengthy weekend project that he creatively titled 'The New Testament -- Latin Edition.'

But enough about Dezzo and his prolific profligation of religious and moral guidebooks, let's look at the actual question here.

First, 'why do we think the grass is always greener?'

That bit's simple enough. Weighed down by the monotonous plod of salary-man life, the horror of abject poverty, the shiny vacuous sheen and ultra-high speed pace of wealth and fame, the choking boredom and neglect of a loveless marriage, the relentless effort of owning a small business, (are you getting the idea yet?) or even the exhausting equanimity of religious enlightenment, I'm fairly sure most of us have times when we think 'bloody hell, what's all this about...Look at that person, they've got a teepee farm in peru, that'd be nice....Oh my god, Paris just gets to take xanax and get her tits out, I wouldn't mind that...'Christ, this 'His Holiness' stuff is really getting me down, I bet the head of Ba'hai doesn't have to act this happy all the time...'

We're grasping fiends. We're daydreamers. We can't see the forest for the trees (hang on was that Erasmus too? Actually no, that was already well established in John Heywood's 1546 proverb almanac)...And we all know it too. We revel in the fanciful nature of it all.

It's the second part of this query that has me stumped...
'...even when we know it's poisonous?'

My answer would be because we simply love the danger of thinking that way. And a daring few actually press it a bit further, hoping sniff out the elusive 'dangerous other side' without having to actually find out it's not that fantabulous after all. It's like the Japanese and Fugu (puffer fish). They know it's bloody dangerous, but they think it tastes so good (why I'm not sure, it has to be the most tasteless of all the aquatic vertebrates)that they train these rubber booted chaps to carefully chop around the 'immediate and agonising poison death sac' bit. The strange thing is the closer the flesh to the sac, the MORE expensive the dish...

I think to get the answer to this part of the question, you really do need to go and have a few brekkie bongs with Sinnish.