The moral?

The moral of the story is that life is alternately good and bad. You can't let the bad stuff push you down too far. Or, alternately, if it does push you down, the secret is to then just hang in there for something good to happen. It usually does.

Let me ask you this:

Have you ever found yourself lolling a Saturday away, watching, say, a TrueBlood marathon? And you push pause and go down to Pollio's and grab a tuna sub with lettuce, tomato, onion, s&p ($5.50)? Then you come back up, sit back in your chair, take a bite, and a bunch of juice squirts out of the bottom of the sub onto the chest of your shirt? And after that you're not sure exactly what to do? I mean, you wipe it off--obviously--but you are: a) right in the middle of the marathon and it's pretty gripping, but b) the smell simply does not go away. You think perhaps you should just take your shirt off but that seems like such a hassle, and there's so much blood being spattered around on the screen that you wonder if some of it is going to actually come out of the television, and then, of course, there'll be more stuff to wipe up, so maybe you should wait til then?

Anyway, this was more or less my situation and I am here to tell you, brother, that I was feeling pretty low.

Then you get up and check your email and somebody sends you, in part, something like this?

Hi Mr. Raymond,

My name is [redacted] and I'm a student at the University of [redacted]. I'm
taking a rhetoric seminar course, "Politics and Media" and for my term
paper, I'll be focusing on your Annotated Fuld painting for a variety of
reasons.

I'm currently crafting my thesis, so it's something along the lines in
which the painting simplified the financial crisis for the general public
(about who to blame) and it allowed Lehman employees to vent, be heard,
and be witnessed. In essence, the painting was an exercise of citizenship
during a time when people needed to be heard.

I've been paying attention to the popularity and articles that this
painting has surfaced, but I had a few questions I think only you could
answer:

[Followed by several questions]

Manomanoman, suddenly your heart soars like an eagle? You don't mind so much anymore the smell of your shirt? To quote Bobby Duval: "It smells like ... victory!" You can't wait to write back and answer all of [redacted]'s questions in such a level of depth that she'll wish she was writing her doctoral thesis except that somebody's just been found dead in their bed in a pool of blood and you pretty much have to get back to TrueBlood, so you are going to deal with answering the questions later?

This, dear readers, is how my day's been going.

Now I'm just waiting for the bad stuff to come back around. It usually does.