Barry Bonds "broke" Hank Aaron's home run record last night.

I did a lot of weight training in my younger days and still get into the gym regularly. What you can't avoid seeing is steroids and their effect. Depending on your body type, you can lift weights for years and scarcely see any increase in muscle size. In my late twenties, it took two years for me to get a somewhat impressive buff look. I would see guys get the same results in a few months while on the juice.

Aside from the extremely rapid muscle development, you could always tell who was juicing because their heads would get bigger, they had a puffy look and acne would get out of control.

There are no "head exercises" you can do to get this effect--its a sure sign of steroid use.

While news stories invariably mention steroid use in conjunction with his name and record chase, we are still playing a kind of public game of denial. Bonds runs the bases to thunderous applause celebrating his "accomplishment", raises his arms in a victory salute, and the jumbotron announces that the record has been broken. Who are we kidding?

Baseball is harmless diversion, but the cultural forces that equivocate between real accomplishment and cheating pervade every corner of our society. From grade school onwards, people will cheat at everything and expect to be rewarded as if they had actually accomplished something in honest fashion.

At some point, we've lost the satisfaction of simply doing something for its own sake. Now everything is a means to an end, with the ultimate goal being fame and wealth.

Take the word "celebrity" for example. It used to be that you were celebrated for having done something or demonstrating unusual skill. Now the word me has been divorced from any meaningful accomplishment--the Paris Hilton effect.

The problem with this can be illustrated by a weed local to the Colorado plateau called appropriately enough--cheat grass. Cheat grass is an annual plant from Eurasia that was inadvertantly introduced in the early 20th century. Its life cycle is opposite the native grasses, which means that it has spouted and established a root system before the native plants get started. As a result, cheat grass displaces native grasses.

So what? Grass is grass, right?

Well, no. Livestock and native foragers like deer and elk can't digest cheat grass, which consequently overbrowse the remaining native species. You get more cheat grass and less of everything else.

Its depressing to realize that we are far less likely to get anymore Beatles, Picassos or Hank Aarons, and a lot more Paris Hilton and Barry Bonds.