The Daoists believed that life revolves around a tenuous balance of equal yet opposite forces: good vs. bad, light vs. dark, dominance vs. submission, etc. They exemplify this balance in the yin/yang symbol common to their art deco. For them, the forces of the world spin around each other, off-setting each other with their polar influences yet keeping the whole of reality perfectly balanced one way or another.

The Druids, on the other hand, believed that perfect balance equals stagnation, that a constant back-and-forth dynamic eventually cancels itself out and reaches a terminus. To foster growth and development they throw a third element into the mixture, like a rock tossed up against a spinning plate. The balance careens and strains to right itself, and in so doing becomes stronger, develops itself, becomes more than it once was. Three was a sacred number to the Druids and endlessly recurs throughout their culture.

Which of them was right? Who can say? A good Daoist might say both of them are right, being equal and opposing answers, whereas a Druid might suggest there's a third option yet overlooked...

As the sun moved behind the earth, in relation to a certain midwestern city in the United States of America, February 13th became February 14th. Valentine's Day, named in honor of an ancient priest who wed soldiers to women against the emperor's will, and was summarily executed for this offense. This is the day people use to recognize and honor their love and affection for each other... or to drink themselves blind due to the lack of that love in their life. In one part of this city a young man dozed in the arms of two cheap floozies he'd partied with the night before; in another area, a young woman cried herself to sleep after losing this man in a heated phone conversation. Two sides of the same Valentinian coin; the Daoist grins smugly as nature once again reaffirms his position.

The Druid, on the other hand, indicates skyward where a very bored Goddess of Love (of no particular culture or theology) reclines upon a pink, fluffy cloud. Her huge, goddess-proportionate feet reach upwards into the heavens, wrangling with stars between Her slender toes; Her brown, dredlocked hair hangs over the cloud, pinpoints of starlight glinting off the gold cuffs interspersed throughout Her locks. Her eyes loll melodramatically and Her hands hang limp at her sides. The Goddess of Love was bored beyond all human capacity, and needed some entertainment.

The earth rolled silently along its path, and its motion caught Her eye. A rosy aura wreathed the orb to remind Her of this special holiday. Grateful for something to do She scanned in closer to observe the denizens of this ball of mud; they'd entertained Her well in the past, they might be good for a laugh now.

She observed with approval the revelry of couples in love, holding hands, toasting each other, blah-dee-blah, all that good stuff. At least people hadn't forgotten all that over the course of the millennia. But then a soft weeping caught Her attention, and Her gaze zoomed in towards this certain midwestern town to observe its source.

Ashley awoke with terrible stomach cramps. It felt like someone had punched her in the stomach with a garden rake and unceremoniously yanked her intestines out across her bedroom. She couldn't identify the dull ache, guessing it had to do with her abdominals clenching repeatedly during her fierce crying jag the previous night. She cursed Brad under her breath as she stumbled off to the kitchen, looking for food to assuage the terrible aching emptiness within.

Chewing Her lip, the Goddess of Love refocused her vision to include the emotional spectrum. Immediately a red line of passion drew from the anguished young woman to the male slut still asleep beneath the floozies. A deep growl resonated from within Her throat and, reaching across the astral plane, She slowly extracted Brad's consciousness from his body. The body, of course, could not withstand the trauma and expired. It would be a couple more hours before the corpse would cool enough to wake the sorority sisters, who would be thrown into a panic and cripple themselves falling down the stairs, but that's another story. No, all we're concerned with is the carriage of Brad's soul across the dozen blocks between his apartment and Ashley's, the dozing spirit cradled in the soft palms of the Goddess of Love. It was to be the last comfort he would know for quite a while.

Sitting down heavily, Ashley's firm young buttocks smacked into the cushion of the hardwood chair in her kitchen. Being that Brad had just been reincarnated into this cushion, as per the Goddess of Love's sensibilities, this was quite a rude awakening for him. Her buttocks covered his face, in his brief flash of consciousness, squishing him back and forth as she settled into her chair. He died promptly thereafter.

Ashley, still sobbing, wiped the saline from her eyes to pour herself a bowl of Radial Oaties for breakfast. The intense longing she felt for Brad, her partner of two and a half years, manifested as an incredible hunger welling deep within her, and her immediate response was to seek out comfort food. She grew up with Radial Oaties, and listening to them ring in the bowl as she poured brought her back to the years of growing up with her family.

Being that Radial Oaties can't scream, she had no idea that Brad had been instantly reincarnated into one of the Oaties. Brad's bewilderment at seeing some dozen of his brethren racing out of a large waxed paper bag and into a ceramic bowl was only outdone by rolling to his side to observe an enormous ex-girlfriend looming above him. Staring in shock (one of the things Radial Oaties do best, besides the Dead Man's Float) he was struck by her red, puffy eyes and her case of the sniffles. Though he broke up with her to sleep with other women, Brad still missed the cute little traits she possessed. When she was sad she would sniffle quietly and it touched his heart; even now, he wanted to wrap his arms around her and rest her head upon his shoulder until her spirit was settled. Instead, he was jarred from his reverie by a deluge of ice-cold low-fat milk.

Panic began to set in as his lactic landscape heaved to and fro, and the air whooshed with the great metal spoon ripping through the atmosphere as Ashley picked it up off the table. Her nipples poked at the flannel nightgown she wore to bed, standing proudly upon modest breasts. Nipples almost as large as he was now, he realized, staring at her chest that yet shuddered with her sobs. The great metal spoon tore through his sky and struck just to his left, scattering his compatriots across the bowl, then heaving him upwards with a dozen luckless Oaties. His heart would have raced at this point, were he still in possession of one, as the gingham patterned nightgown flew past his vision, cresting with a collar of lace, which led to Ashley's ivory neck and soft jawline. Curls of chestnut hair framed the enormous head, and then her pink, full lips parted to reveal a glistening cavern of jagged ivory teeth, a throbbing tongue, and a bottomless chasm beyond. Again, screaming a silent Oatie scream, Brad was shoveled into the gaping maw, tumbling over other Oaties. He rolled over her tongue for a moment, her hundreds of papillae tickling him mercilessly, before getting himself caught between her right premolars and shattered into crumbs. Brad died instantly, again.

He was still reeling with shock when his soul was tenderly inserted into the next Radial Oatie.

The Goddess of Love can be a wonderful friend when one pursues Her earnestly and does credit to that which She stands for. But woe betide the fool who makes a mockery of Her church, especially when she's paying attention. Especially when she's bored. The entire morning went like this: Brad gets reincarnated as a particle of cereal; Ashley eats him; Brad dies; repeat. Brad had never experienced such an emotionally taxing breakfast before in his life. One moment he's floating in the milk (progressively soggier with each incarnation); the next he's racing up towards his ex-girlfriend's sweet, sweet lips and being dumped upon her tongue. If he was lucky he managed to remain some moments upon her tongue while all the other Oaties were dashed and mangled effortlessly. The echo of their bodies being rent asunder thundered in his ears, as his grainy body rose and fell with every twitch of the young woman's tongue. Sometimes he was swallowed whole, in Ashley's haste to fill up the empty space in her life. This entailed a long, rambling descent through a satiny, quivering esophagus in pitch blackness. Sometimes it was a freefall into her stomach; sometimes he'd catch onto the side of a slimy wall of tissue, and the next sortie of cereal and milk would wash him off. At any rate, he ended up falling through the narrow, black passageway and land upon the corpses of those who had gone before him, the oaty mess churning in her stomach acid. That was the worst for him, to be dissolved and broken down by that slow process, and it got no easier to experience each time he endured it.

At length Ashley finished her breakfast. Wiping her runny nose on a paper napkin, she carried her bowl to the sink and put away the Radial Oaties and milk. As her bare feet padded heavily across the linoleum floor, she noted a slight, marginal lessening of her longing for her treacherous ex-boyfriend. Not much, but a little. She figured she was just full, and trotted off to the bedroom to dress for her day.

Brad's next incarnations were a bizarre pastiche of Ashley's working day. He was a particle of bacteria aloft in her front yard as she walked up and inhaled him. One moment he was just floating along, staring bewilderedly at the world pitching and keening about him; the next, he heard a rushing sound and caught a brief glimpse of Ashley's face, made-up for work, huge as a billboard and approaching rapidly. Uttering a teeny bacterial yelp he rode a jet stream straight up her right nostril. He was plunged into darkness as thick, coarse hair raked his body. He finally found some rest on the mucous lining of her sinus and slowly suffused himself into the tender, pink skin, when suddenly he was surrounded by white blood cells and got the snot beat out of him. Once again, Brad died.

He came back as a fleck of tree bark, from the oak in Ashley's front yard. The cellular activity was sufficient to sustain his consciousness for a few minutes, and his life consisted of looking up to see Ashley's sneaker descend upon him, mashing him against the thin layer of ice coating the sidewalk, and finding himself adhered to the sole of her shoe. She mashed and mangled him through the snow on the way to her car, pulping him a little bit more each time she stepped upon his tiny soul vessel. She really gave him hell, being stuck to her right shoe - she drove an automatic, and crushed him with every rapid acceleration and hasty brake. He died by the time she made it to work.

He came back as a small ball of butterscotch hard candy, and enjoyed a few minutes of respite in a fancy cellophane wrapper. If he'd bothered to know his ex-girlfriend more intimately he might have remembered that butterscotch happened to be her favorite flavor: she snatched him up between enormous, soft fingertips as he rested in the candy dish at the receptionist's desk. She stripped him quickly and popped him into her mouth without a second thought. As she greeted her coworkers and ran through her email she slowly eroded his candy body over her tongue over the next 20 minutes. Brad would've gotten dizzy and sick if he'd been in possession of a metabolism that permitted that. Instead, she jockeyed his spherical self around her mouth, rolling him off her tongue until he collided with the fencework of her teeth. Chips of him flew off at times; many times he was deafened by her roaring voice as she answered phone calls. Ultimately, however, her mighty jaws scissored open one last time and her tongue rolled him onto her molars, and his body neatly cracked in half as she pliared him to death.

He was several more bacteria after that, dying in similar ways as before.

The Goddess of Love rolled on Her pink cloud, laughing uproariously in the heavens to witness the spectacle. Sometimes She would guide Brad into a new body; sometimes She would simply let the Fates decide in what part of her daily path he would appear. The results were always hilarious, to Her, and She was so glad She didn't sleep in this morning.

Finally lunchtime rolled around and Ashley felt in the mood for something light. She made her way to the food court next to her building and ordered a salad. Brad was never much for vegetables, she noted, and she would enjoy being able to eat a nice salad without him commenting on how good red meat felt to tear with one's teeth, how savory its juices ran over his tongue and down his throat. She realized she began to feel much better about breaking up, though of course she would miss having someone around... Still, she could certainly find someone better than that knuckle-dragger, couldn't she? The thought titillated her.

Brad was still wrestling with the concept of being turned into a large leaf of lettuce. He felt crippled as he realized he could no longer photosynthesize, something he never knew he needed to do before. All wondering was brought to a close, however, as Ashley's plastic fork descended like vengeance from the heavens and speared crudely through his wide, leafy body. Agony shot through his senses yet through the haze of pain he was able to see the familiar passage of events yet again: racing up past those firm, delicious breasts, past her graceful, swanlike neck, and getting stuffed inside her hot, humid mouth. As lettuce, his body was broken into a dozen pieces and shredded by incisors and molars alike, and his consciousness tended to last longer in that body. He lasted slightly less in the body of black olives, slowly ground to a pulp between her teeth and sucked into her throat. Death was almost instant as her merciless ivory teeth crunched his shredded carrot incarnations, but there was so much shredded carrot that Brad lasted almost as long as the lettuce, in total.

Finally, the salad finished, Ashley wiped the specks of Brad off the corners of her mouth and stepped into the bathroom to floss shreds of Brad from between her teeth. Brad slowly began to break down and nourish her body, and he was dazzled by the sensation of being distributed throughout multifarious blood vessels and strained through various organs. He'd never felt closer to her in his life, and he truly, deeply regretted not having had more to do with her - not because of the five hours of torment and punishment in her mouth, but because now he truly understood who she was on the inside and he wanted more of it.

It was not to be: her body's natural processes took what they needed from Brad and rejected the rest. It clung to the fibrous strands of Brad's other bodies and gathered in sweet Ashley's colon. Brad slowly pulled himself together and formed one short, stout lump of feces, which Ashley saw fit to expel. Brad caught one last glimpse of his ex-girlfriend's firm young ass as he was dashed into the chilling waters and flushed into the sewer.

Yet even this was not the end; even if Ashley had had her fill of Brad, filled up the Brad-shaped hole in her life, the Goddess of Love was not done by a longshot. Brad retained his consciousness as a lump of shit and figured he was safe now, because who ate that kind of stuff? Floating down a dark river far beneath the city, he realized who: dozens of cockroaches and other bugs swam out to greet him, tearing his body apart and assimilating him into their own metabolisms, and he retained his consciousness. Those bugs spawned and brought new bugs into the world, and Brad was an aware part of each of them. Endlessly, maddeningly this went on, and Brad wondered if this was what it meant to finally become one with the universe...

The Daoists and the Druids may not agree on some large points, but they do come to meet on smaller, finer details. They know enough to respect Love.