Everything That Goes Up

Firm, large, with whatever the ideal nipple situation happens to be—breasts have governed men, governments, and the imagination since the beginning of recorded culture. Hidden under layers of wool in the name of modesty, or deployed with obvious intent and the expected results. They produce in us an insatiable drive toward discovery, conquest, and exposure that no amount of civilization has managed to fully redirect. The only design flaw is that they’re subject to the same physics as everything else on this planet. Isaac Newton, you absolute bastard.

Best current example of physics winning: Lindsay Lohan at Coachella. There was a period, not that long ago, when entire films were digitally adjusted in post-production just to manage what she was carrying around. Those days are behind her. What the recent photos show is gravity doing its patient work, her formerly spectacular architecture heading in one direction at a pace that can no longer be ignored. She was something, once. Genuinely, specifically hot in a way very few people manage to be. The current situation is sad in the specific way that beautiful things deteriorating is always sad.

The remedies are all compromised: obsessive gym work that shrinks the rest of your life down to nothing; surgery, which trades one problem for a catalog of new ones; or acceptance, which nobody actually achieves—they just learn to perform it convincingly. Gravity has an unbroken record. It beats bras, exercise regimens, and the best surgical intervention given enough time. The only variable is how long you hold it off, and at what cost.

There’s a feeling that comes from watching a beautiful thing go that isn’t quite grief and isn’t quite pleasure. The hour was always coming. You knew that going in.