Gallons Burned: 185.82
Caffeinated Drinks: 34
I'm sitting half a mile pass an oil refinery on a two lane road frequented by hunters with shotguns and fishers with graphite rods. As the engine idles, powering this netbook, I look out at egrets, pelicans, and dozens of other unidentifiable birds. It's overcast and the trees sit out in the bayous looking like the masts of sunken galleons that have been locked in ice.
I can smell my steak searing on the stove under cover of bacon, and "I think to myself what a wonderful world". Um actually...I just had that great song pop into my head.
In truth, what I have been thinking about all day is a family's feeling of loss when they came back to see their house destroyed by the storm surge. The entrepreneur who put 30 years into his hardware store, building it piece by piece and defeating all opponents, only to have it scattered and laid waste by hundred-mile-an-hour winds. Even after 4 years the wounds in this community are blatantly evident. Whole neighborhood's with no one but rats for tenants. Wrecked shrimp boats dragged unceremoniously from highways and left to rot in the ditches. Behind each rotting house, car, business, and boat was a man's dream, a goal, possibly a life's pursuit. All gone, all "meaningless."
This volunteer fire department still uses their old partially collapsed building.
When I use the word "meaningless", I use it as Solomon used it. Meaningless is used over 30 times in his book Ecclesiastes and is selected to show how finite and how brief life, achievements, and pursuits really are. Perhaps "vapor" is a better term. The dude actually opens his book with: "Meaningless, meaningless all is meaningless." His publisher must have been an imbecile. You don't start like that! Who would want to read past that?
Well...I guess I am rather undiscriminating. Anyway, he lived it up: master of wealth, master of sex, master of political power, master of a nation, and master of reputation. His freaking house was way bigger and more elaborate than the one they built to God. He had a posse and a harem. And then he has the gall to write this book at the end of his life and say, "Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless." (He does eventually close the book with an answer to life's meaninglessness, you can read it for yourself if you want.)
I haven't lived very long; I haven't seen the deepest horrors of this world. Looking at the devastation here in the Ninth Ward and the Mississippi River delta, I think he's right. Life is a vapor, before I know it I'll be dead and all my achievements and pursuits (even my name and any memory that I even existed) will all be forgotten.
So now that you are all sad and (now a quick quote from one of the funniest guys I have ever met) "have a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand and a gun in the other, wondering if you should end it all right here", what do you do?
Solomon answer: "nothing is better for you than to eat and drink and enjoy the good of your labor."
So I come back to where I started. Steak! Wow I love steak. It's so tasty and good, the rare/medium rare tender goodness just calls out to me. I wish I weren't driving back to New Orleans after this otherwise, I would totally pop open a bottle of Washington state cabernet and enjoy a glass with my steak. Eat my friends, drink too, enjoy your life because you don't have long to live.
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