A Mysteriously Enchanted Evening With Dopamine Soaked Truffles

'It's the economy, stupid'!' had touted Bill Clinton as the argument for his successful 1992 presidential bid. His wife Hillary was on TV last night, sitting close to the left of Obama that she was debating, her pretty cow eyes smiling, her oxen-like hubby nowhere in sight.
I was sitting on our love seat to the left of Nikki (Nicole Beaudry), both of us watching and listening with great interest, connecting stuff and having a good time. Facing me (i.e. Jacques Poirier), a white non-smoking retiree, was the politician Barrak Obama, a black fellow that is said to hide to smoke cigarettes, always wrapped up in a clean aura of youth and dynamism . On the right, facing the smoker Beaudry sitting next to me, was Hillary, the non-smoking white woman debating Obama. At one point we had two of those quaintly wrapped truffles bought locally just a week ago. Luck of the draw, I picked a white chocolate coated one while Nikki picked a dark one. Both debaters were very professional and courteous while reciting their respective strong points. Obama had those powerful terse statements, well paced, while Hillary wiggled beautifully, covering all bases but sometimes dragging on for too long. My mate Nikki made short comments, always to the point, while I sometimes rambled my own opinions for too long, distracting her.
So I decided to have a cigarette to better contain my excitement. I quit smoking two months ago but I sometimes have a vacation where I smoke a few and then quit again fo awhile to clear my throat. Thinking about all this under our flannel sheets this morning, I had a moment of serendipity (scientese for 'good luck'), the object of this blog. So hang on...we'll get there!

'It's the MAO.b, stupid!" I now insist, the main reason why it is so hard to quit smoking. What is that all about? Let me explain: but first let's go back a few decades when people smoked in airplanes. Remember those armrest ashtrays and the blue smoke that just exploded five minutes after take-off? One little old non-smoking lady had sent a newspaper the following letter, one that struck me and that I approximately memorized:

"I'm a little old five-foot lady with a serious scoliosis of my back, a fact that has dropped my stature down to four-foot something. When I fly, I always go to the smokers section even though I don't smoke. The reason is that absolutely no one in the non smoking front part of the plane helps...or even sees me...as if I didn't exist. The moment I reach the smokers section five to ten people get up at the same time to help me put my baggage in the overhead compartment. Smokers are definitely better people".

I don't think so. People are people. But a smoker's brain performs more connections. Dopamine swamped, their neural pathways connect at twice the rate of the non-smokers lazier MOA.b inhibited brain, as shown in diagram below. This from a recent study at Brookhaven National Institute shows what happens to the level of the 'killjoy' neurotransmitter MAO,b (monoamine oxydase b) a few seconds after a happy dopamine moment, the 'well-being' neurotransmitter: it is totally recaptured by a good squirt of MOA,b , one that is absent in the 51-year old female smoker. Then the thrill is gone in the non-smoker, it's chemistry recycled for a later thrill. The smoker just goes on and on, stretching his dopamine levels like an old bubble gum, maintaining enough connectivity to relate to the little old lady, her large carrying bag, the hump on her back, the visual comparative cue of a distance to high to the overhead compartment. Meanwhile 200 non-smokers are lost in their private reverie, connecting zilch. MOA,b dismantles the dopamine chemistry so fast it has been called 'killjoy' by researchers.
This is why I had to smoke last night to better enjoy that debate. And here's what I found, synthetized neatly while still lurching under the flannel sheets this morning:

By carefully listing the boolean properties of the people and things that populated our evening as smokers/watchers/eaters/commentators , I found out the connections and listed them in the grid at the left. Check it out carefully. Gender showing an 'X' for a male and 'O' for female etc...
Then I totaled the results, parsing them under TOTAL as you can see, XOX for Obama, OXO for Clinton, OXXO for myself and XOXO for Nikki. The obvious result is the opposite 'O's' and 'X's' between Obama and Clinton, something we all noticed without even thinking about it.
Black male, white female, obvious! The fact that Nikki and I have opposites too is also well known in this household where explosive encounters occur from time to time. But wait, there is more!...much more as I decided to explore this promising vein..

No wonder I was so mysteriously excited last night after unwrapping my white chocolate truffle, having boosted my dopamine to new levels thanks to a few Malboros. Although I was not aware of it till this morning, the truffles have a metallic wrapper with the name XOX clearly printed. I quickly Googled 'XOX' this morning to the San Francisco maker, chef Jean-Marc Gorce. Then I checked out Nikki's score as XOXO, finding a clothing manufacturer by that name, one that has on its home page a model looking exactly like Nikki forty seven years ago. This number is the actual age of Barrak Obama (47). Mystified I looked at my own score, OXXO. This literally bowled me over. Dig this, OXXO is a 'tienda' situated one kilometer from our Cantamar house in Mexico, and it is THE PLACE WHERE I BOUGHT THE DAMN TRUFFLES LAST WEEK.
I went crazy and lit another Malboro. First, the idea to have a chocolate truffle last night came from seeing Obama's cute little edible brown head ( for the record, I am neither gay nor racist)
This would explain the XOX connection to Obama's score. And my own OXXO connection becomes obvious since I am the one who bought the darn OXO things. Nikki 's connection is more questionable since her lips aren't as fat as those of the twenty year old model shown here. True, the latter might have had lip enlargement, a non-existing procedure in the fifties. On the other hand, maybe Nikki's lips were fatter then. I'll certainly ask her that as I am looking at her, pretty as ever playing PacMan on her computer, unaware of my tortuous inquiries into life on earth as we know it.
Left out was Hillary's score as OXO. Piece of cake! I was musing at her brown eyes last night. OXO is a well-know cow by-product. On second thought, those tasty little beef bouillon cubes I munched on as a boy scout did not convinced me fully of the validity of that connection. And Bill Clinton is more snake-like than oxen-like, a character better given to ex-president Gerald Ford. So I did the Google thing one more time and found it, the perfect product for Hillary, a mango splitter quite popular in Mexico and made by a company named OXO. Hillary DOES split my 'mango' from time to time, and maybe yours too, right? Plus this other fact: I have girlfriend blogger named 'Mango' and I sometimes wish she would split with her boyfriend. That's it then, Hillary, the Mango-splitter! I need Mango to respond to this blog below and comment on her opinion of Hillary Clinton, stressing connections one more time. For a follow-up, I will respond to her comment...and to yours too, of course. We need to complete this flagging experiment.

As a temporary conclusion to all of this, would you agree with me that a little MAO.b squirted in the synaptic gap goes a long way in suppressing too many weak connections induced by un-recaptured dopamine? Ain't that a good reason to quit smoking? All of a sudden, I want to be like those smooth non-smoking passengers who barely glanced at the old lady with the dowager's hump. Connect nothing. Like cows in a pasture burping quietly at a passing train. My new letters are "Z"E"N", I quit smoking again and I will write short dreamy pointless blogs in the future. That's a switch from those Malboro-produced blawgs that gives me and you a 'mango-splitting' headache. No more cigarettes! Let the old lady jump for the overhead compartment, let's vote for McCain, let general Petraeus achieve victory in Iraq, what recession?...Ron Paul? Never heard of him. Let's go see my lovely Nikki and play a few rounds PacMan till dinner time.