MEN AND WOMEN—there’s a difference. At least that’s what Shields’ mom formerly decreed. It’s history. It’s science. It’s nature. It’s everything to do with equality and ONLY ONE HAPPINESS. And along with the laws of only one happiness, Shields also knew, by heart, all the other rules in Mom’s house. That’s why he waited a year after his 13th birthday to ask her about the man he’d met the previous Christmas, in his Grandma’s cellar. This was a terrible mistake. When Shields simply asked if the man she called “husband” loved him, his Ma threw a fit! The word LOVE was strictly verboten in or out of their home.

For it was his Mom’s belief that love, as a word, was worthless. “Gens de peu (the meaner class of people),” she’d crow with characteristic fervor. “Love everything from inanimate objects to gods, celebrities, and prime-time TV.” She’d quiz Shields: “And how can love describe the affections of men and women when we incessantly jabber, ‘I LOVE THE FLAG! I LOVE COKE! I LOVE NEW YORK! I LOVE JESUS! Have you ever seen a bumper sticker that says: I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS?'”

When Shields admitted to never seeing such a bumper sticker, or knowing what it actually meant to love, mom told him a story about a long forgotten, magical time when men and women were equally capable of love, because they both possessed The Lobe. God’s Lobe. The Lobe almighty.

She described the Lobe as a fleshy cask that once resided in the gut of every person, man and woman alike. And the Lobe produced a candied wine that could be sapped from this miraculous organ whenever a person was feeling fearful, anxious, or depressed. For anyone, be they man or woman, their unhappiness could be thwarted by the Lobe’s most sorcerous ambrosia of undiluted philanthropy—filtered through tenderness—and cured by everlasting friendship; creating a sugary sweet, yet highly potent syrup that the Lobe, continuously, manifested on demand.

In the beginning, his mom professed, the world of the Lobe was truly a place of harmony and enchantment between the sexes. Everybody spent their days devising newfangled ways of giving of themselves to others. Immediately upon waking each morning, people of all ages would attempt to compose a new dance or song or design a previously unimagined sculpture, painting, whatever their heart’s desire. All soulful things. Things like a unique way to touch or caress; anyway, to bestow on another human being some benevolence, deed, or token that no one had ever heard, seen, or felt before.

For within this lobian paradise, it was believed that mankind possessed an infinite number of gestures. And through the uninhibited exploration of these gestures, everyone could bring joy and comfort to anyone who, for any reason, might feel slighted or lost or unloved … even while indulging in the Lobe’s increasingly gratuitous gifts of gentleness and placidity.

Yet, no matter how incredibly wondrous this world became, the Lobe, its grape, its nectar, never ceased to age even more beautifully, more powerfully, producing evermore peace, benignity, imagination, and the finest degrees of sensuality ever experienced. When tragically, without reason, a group of men became overly confused and frightened of their own heightened levels of rapture. Of awareness. Of sensitivity. Thereby producing—out of a bygone, cheerless time—a psychosis so strong that, eventually, they decided to put an end to their unregulated cycles of ecstasy.

It was these men of “moderation” who, in establishing their first line of defense against the escalating sensations of unmitigated serenity, formed an exclusive organization that pledged to cleanse their blood and purify their bodies by rejecting the Lobe’s pleasure. With the piety of high priests, they contended that—only through the staid condition of self-restraint and sobriety—could man discover his divined state of grace.

“God’s welfare,” they’d claim, “extends only to the soul … and NOT the body proper.”

It was during their abstinence, their search for more “Godly” realms of elation, that these “moderating” men noticed that—when a woman menstruated, she was exceedingly joyful—far more than the still “imbibing” men. Not to mention, mothers-to-be, who were doubly satisfied when pregnant, and beyond euphoria at the climax of childbirth.

It was this prejudice, this very inequity of the Lobe towards the happiness of women versus men, that so outraged the males abstaining that, “ONLY ONE HAPPINESS,” became their warning cry. “ONLY ONE HAPPINESS,” was wailed and repeated. “ONLY ONE HAPPINESS,” hardened their resolve. “ONLY ONE HAPPINESS,” was pledged, beseeched, and finally, prayed like a decree-on-high as these men-of-atonement alerted the populace to the immorality and hideous imbalance of happiness between men and women.

With no one, from either sex, capable of controlling the flow of extra nectar through a woman’s veins, it was decided that, because every man was being cheated of his God-given right to equal happiness, science, or what was to become Science with a capital S, would be called on to rectify the situation. But how, in what way, could they physically, and psychically, solve the problem of what was increasingly known as a man’s lost “entitlement” and a woman’s “curse” against humanity itself?

After repeated rounds of debate, the soberest of the abstaining men, (i.e. the emerging scientists) concluded that only by taking a large cross-section of women and examining them internally, could the superfluous ecstasy be explained, controlled and, in the end, corrected; thereby, balancing the warring happiness between the sexes. Bringing equality “to all God’s children.”

So scientists, the world over, began hacking about in the innards of women, probing and searching for the source of their excessive glow. But no matter how many exploratory operations they performed, the scientists continually failed to grasp the Lobe’s workings, its secrets, its magic.

From the depths of the jungles to the highest mountain peaks, the men of goodwill and abstinence were both morally outraged and justifiably terrified by the fact that the Lobe could be even more supernaturally evil than previously imagined! Disgusted by science’s inability to produce concrete solutions, all the non-imbibers, those of unquestioned temperance, began performing their own forms of surgery. They instigated procedures that not only found them whacking women apart, but, in a blind panic, instituting a maniacal postoperative ritual of drinking the woman’s blood and eating her flesh, gorging themselves on whatever might provide even the minutest taste of the feminine mystique.

Now nothing was too extreme in their quest for justice and ONLY ONE HAPPINESS.

Although the temperate, non-scientific men’s butchery was also an abject failure in finding the cause of a woman’s extra bliss, the blood-feast, at least, smacked of something new, something sanctifying, a retribution or penance maybe, a holy something to balance the prejudice of the Lobe toward women and away from men.

Thus, without the slightest glint of remorse or introspection the sacrifices raged on. Becoming the way of the world. Until the majority of women realized that their destruction was imminent if they didn’t start protecting themselves against the men of abstinence. Women of every race, creed, and color fought back. With a measure of success. Because in the original world women were of equal strength with men.

So throughout the lands, the sexes slaughtered their opposites, religiously mutilating their counterparts’ most vital, private, intimate organs, in strict accord, with the doctrine of ONLY ONE HAPPINESS.

When finally, after a thousand years of these increasingly crude disembowelment and consecrative feasts, something strange began to evolve. The Lobe, in both men and women, started to ferment less and less nectar. Until it produced none at all. Not a drop of internal wine could be summoned forth. The inbred intoxicant of kindness and charity was gone. Now the world no longer subscribed to an individual’s multitudinous gesture of “hands-on giving” as an antidote to the blues, but only found relief from outside sources. Drugs and drink were distilled externally. Meaning that the only legally sanctioned cure-alls left were those designed without a trace of human, gut-level love in the formula.