keyword: vanity, title: Ecclesiastes 1-3 in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Frank broke with academic orthodoxy on the subject of skin-ape culture in many ways but most importantly on the question of whether humans were anything other than an evolutionary cul-de-sac, fear-drenched savage mistakes that took the world through brutal tenacities, effective in the short-term but ultimately signifying nothing. He agreed with sasquatch thinking on the surface facts because, I mean, that’s what we are, dumb things blowing holes in each other over patches of fallow earth, but Frank saw in us sprinklings of grace here or there, the faint stain of divinity swept across furrowed brows. We make beautiful music, far better than anything those yetis have ever approached, for example. Some of our art is brilliant. The few who’ve been cloistered from the meat-hook hell of day-to-day living have done great work, Frank saw that in us. A few with the time to stretch out their minds have brushed against the brass ring of wisdom, actual beauty, actual truth. Yes, most of us, a vast swath of humanity sucks terribly, living as mayflies in hazes of hatred and hoarding until death screaming the same fears that consumed every other moment.

Frank had a theory, though, why: we just didn’t live long enough for most of us to be anything other than reflex machines swinging in darkness at all the threats real or imagined. Seventy or eighty years, what the hell is that, what hopes could we have? Frank was still in their equivalent to grade school, his eightieth turn ‘round the sun. It is astonishing we can spell our own names, in Frank’s estimation, amazing we still manage to come up with things as great as rock songs. Eighty years, losing so much of even that short time to food gathering, mate chasing and creditor evasion, Frank unlike his brethren was in awe of how much we’ve done with so little, even if we are just shoving berries up our noses most of the time. We just don’t live long enough. The rare humans that develop something to say tend to evade the drudgery of normal life through social structures like fame, holy orders or inherited wealth. The prince Buddha, a child of prosperous contractors Jesus Christ, even da Vinci protected by landed patronage, sometimes it happened.

So where would a sasquatch go to study people with the slight chance of being so isolated from functional life by privilege and dumb luck that they might have a chance to think or say or make something transcendent, other than the cash-bloated wasteland of Hollywood? Sure, money and fame drive most into terminal spirals of gluttonous excess and cruel vanity, but there’d be a few with so much free time they could turn out interesting, even with so few years. Frank heard the voice of all that was the best and worst about us mad little exploding miracles, it said just one thing to him, he knew he had to follow. Our collective voice just whispered “Join me in L.A.”