letters from barabbas

Epicurus said that eating alone is the life of a wolf. He thought that the whole point of life was to enjoy yourself as much as possible, but that it was pointless if you don't have a few good friends to enjoy it with. So he moved into a big house with a lot of other intellectual types to eat good food and drink good wine (in moderation, of course, for he abhorred over-indulgence) and form a whole philosophy out of it. The part about pleasure being the meaning of life is pretty much bullshit, as far as I can tell, but he's on to something with the part about the friends.

I passed a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor of an off-to-the-side hallway in Parker this morning. He was hunched over a tupperware bowl eating something that looked like sawdust, his face reflecting up at him in the shiny brown linoleum. He glanced at me as I passed the way a dog will shift a little when you get too close to his food. And I thought, "Are we animals without each other?"