Sunsets

When I was a teenager growing up in La Jolla, I would take my girlfriend to the beach everyday after school. We would sit on the park bench, my right hand around her shoulder with that gorgeous blond hair draped over my muscled weightlifter arms and we would stare quietly at the breakers as the sun set over the flat horizon of the ocean. I always thought I would never experience anything quite so beautiful.

I was wrong. Now, forty years later, sunsets remain my passion. I am constantly on the road as a salesman for the Fulcrum Joint Company. We make the world's most expensive elbows and fittings for the world's most discriminating chemical companies. My two children, who are getting an expensive education from the proceeds of my work, are constantly telling me I'm helping to destroy the environment. If only they knew what my real mission was in life. I help my clients produce spectacular sunsets.

You see, I've learned the best place to watch a sunset isn't on some sandy California beach. It's in desolate cities like LaMarque, Texas or Sulphur, Louisiana or Gary, Indiana. Why there? Because the most important ingredient in a connoisseur's sunset is Air Pollution. The smokestacks my customers use to spew cancer-causing contaminants into the air, poisoning the people who live downwind from their outflow also add particulate matter to the atmosphere.

As the sun begins its trek towards the horizon every afternoon, its rays reflect off that gunk and produce the shades of red and yellow and orange that I crave in a great sunset.

I sometimes wonder what ever happened to my high school girlfriend. I fantasize of finding her, sweeping her off her feet, and taking her in a private jet to a chemical plant in Buffalo and showing her my accomplishments, some of the world's greatest sunsets.

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[John Shore]

I fear you. But in a good, almost tingly kind of way.