The long view doesn’t have to lead you to nihilism.  It can also lead you to gratitude, to the understanding that your individual existence is the result of a near-impossible, billions of years, winning streak. Consider: Every woman has seven million eggs. Every ejaculation 100 million sperm.  You had to win two lotteries to be born. Your two parents had to win four lotteries and your four grandparents eight lotteries and so on, going back 100,000 years. And then millions of years of hominids, and millions more of apes, and billions of years of whatever life forms we were before that. And that’s just to be conceived.  All our ancestors had to make it to birth, and then avoid all the perils of life– predators, …

All the different Beauty and Beast stories we know can be put into two categories.  In one, the beast is eventually transformed, turned handsome – The Frog Prince, Beauty and the Beast… (I count Shrek in this category, although there, beauty is the one transformed. But in the end they match.) In the second kind, there is no transformation.  The beast stays a beast.  Think Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dam, Cyrano, King Kong. Here’s what’s interesting:  In every transformation story, they live happily ever after. In every story where the beast stays a beast, he dies.  The beast is never allowed to consummate his love.  We don’t allow beauty to be defiled. Even in the true beast stories–My Left Foot, Mask, The Elephant man–the …

I was watching Jimmy Pardo’s Running Your Trap, a game show where three celebrity guests all claim a story and the contestants try to guess which one is telling the truth.  In one round the story was, “I talked my way out of getting arrested for shoplifiting.” Now the guests were 2 men and one woman, Janet Varney.  You can Google her if you like or you can just take my word for it:  Janet is pretty.  The guys were average-looking and I hope if they hear this they’ll forgive me for saying so. So who do you think was the one?  If you were there, I think you would have guessed the same as I did, the same as both contestants.  We all thought it …

Once I dreamt I was taking photographs of a guy playing guitar. It felt like they were coming out great.  I was using an old camera and looking forward to seeing the pictures when they developed.  I thought maybe one will be the cover of his next album. Then I woke up. I don’t know who he was supposed to be, but that musician is never going to have an album.  He was a figment of my imagination.  Same goes for the camera and the film.  And those pictures.  They’ll never be developed. As I woke up and realized this, I felt a sense of loss.  I had been looking forward to something that I’ll never get to see. But then I thought, really, in the …