Cheap wine

Some friends and I were offered a creative opportunity recently that we may decline. It would be an easy gig and it would pay as well as anything else we do, but we’re hesitating for two reasons.

The first reason, maybe the main reason, is that we aren’t hungry. Not for money or experience or associations or anything else the opportunity represents.

The second reason is that the gig, while easy and remunerative, just doesn’t excite us. I could go on at some length about why it doesn’t excite us, but the sum of the parts is that life’s too short to drink cheap wine.

Provided, of course, that you can afford non-cheap wine.

Which we sort of can.

(At right is Melvin Vaniman, first engineer of the ill-fated America, after the crew was rescued by the Trent. The America was a hydrogen-powered dirigible attempting to cross the Atlantic. It’s engines failed, the crew jumped out and the dirigible sailed off, never to be seen again. Vaniman’s cat seems unmoved by the inauspicious end of its career as a dirigible mascot.)