You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy! ™
No matter what happened today, the world keeps spinning.
It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It just is!
Sunrise. Sunset. NEXT!
No matter how bad the tornadoes in Oklahoma, the world keeps spinning. No matter how bad the fires in California, the world keeps spinning.
It gives life a chance to bring a new day, to heal lives or, as if often the case, a new chance to kick someone else’s unsuspecting ass.
I’m knee deep in a southern fried tragedy. Every day I talk to someone with a garbage pile on their front yard. I talk to someone who uses a row boat to get their mail. I talk to someone who has lost faith in Bank of America and FEMA all in the same afternoon.
But if you don’t live here in Nash-Vegas, then maybe you see our tragedy on your TV set right before sports and weather. Perhaps you have a beer in your hand right now, wondering if Vince Gill’s guitars will make it? I know that’s what I care about. The beer, not Vince Gill’s guitars.
Either way, the world keeps spinning.
You see, Nashville’s flood is a regional tragedy, and if you don’t live in Middle Tennessee, this is an event you can click on when you are done surfing the internet for porn.
The moral of this story; people care, but the world keeps spinning.
There’s no time to languish in self pity or wait for someone in a FEMA-copter to pluck you from a roof top. You better seize the moment and take care of your own ass, because chances are nobody cares about your back side as much as you do.
Keep your head on a swivel, because the world keeps spinning.
I am convinced the only news that really matters is local news. That’s the news that affects you directly. It’s the news you use, that tells you whether you will need to wear sunglasses or a coat or spray your house with a garden hose so it doesn’t burn to the ground.
And so the world, like it or not, keeps spinning, spewing out new disasters with all the accuracy of a blind drunk throwing darts.
While Nashville cleans up, The Gulf prepares for its atrocity to wash ashore. The oil is gushing out of the ocean floor like a fountain of wild dingos at Belagio. While BP is doing a p.r. dance to explain how they are going to cap the goo with golf balls and bailing wire, dolphins and shrimp are coming ashore wearing petroleum covered condoms.
And the world keeps spinning.
There is a new candidate for the Supreme Court and Washington is polarizing over the nomination. Is she gay? Come on America, really?
And the world keeps spinning.
Somewhere in the world a fire burns and a monsoon rages and an airliner crashes and the world keeps spinning.
Today I talked to a sheriff’s deputy who has spent the last three days on an angry churning river that is concealing bodies below its murky currents. The deputy was dragging the 20 foot water with a large hook looking for one of those bodies when I called him on his cell phone.
Why does the deputy think the body is there?
Because dogs trained specifically to detect the smell of a decomposing body bubbling out of moving water tell him so.
For the last three days his men have been running a search grid on the Cumberland River outside of Ashland City. This is a city that I flew over last week. I was looking for the Cheatham Dam. I finally gave up because I couldn’t find it. Apparently it was under 7 feet of water.
And the world keeps spinning.
I stand on the shore and zoom in to the trio of rescue boats slowly drifting over a specific spot in the river, a spot the dogs barked at, essentially saying: “this is the place.”
How do you find a bloated body snagged on a river rock under 25 feet of water?
The sergeant tells me that he runs the hook over the bottom of the river, as delicately as a brain surgeon snipping neurons. He says he feels the current, the energetic pulse that flows in the river, differentiating between logs and lumps and flesh. Like a blind man searching a for a pea in the Sahara, the deputy continues his quest.
He says he does it because he knows the family needs closure.
And the world keeps spinning.
Take stock of today. Take a moment to remember right now.
Because if you blink the world will blow away your moment and fill it with the next moment.
A moment that is chosen as randomly as cards fed into a leaf blower being operated inside a moving convertible.
And the world keeps spinning.
And that my friends, is crazy.