Sometimes people ask me about writing insurance claims for hurricane victims, "Don't you feel bad about your livelihood depending on the misfortune of others?" An owner of a pizza restaurant asked me this once and I politely reminded him that his nice house, his new car, and his sexy wife were purchased with the empty stomachs of hungry children. Even construction contractors and carpenters, of all people, have asked me the same question somehow oblivious to the fact that much of their job security comes from the deleterious (albeit gradual) effects of weather on building materials. Profiting off of slow and cumulative damage to homes and businesses is fine, you see.

I would gladly inhabit a world where, perhaps as in the Garden of Eden, people didn't have needs, but no one has yet provided me with the necessary interstellar coordinates and the spaceship I would need to get there. Besides, what I really wanted to do for a living was pimp hoes. Instead I shake down big, evil insurance companies for cash to give to pizza craving, hurricane victims. So let us count our blessings and get that plank (or calzone as it were) out of your eye. While pizza man is TAKING money from needy people, I'm GIVING money to them, and at no small effort.

Maybe pizza man would like to come stay with me in a sleazy, humid motel one thousand miles from home with no electricity for a few back to back, one hundred hour work weeks and then wait five or six months to get paid. It aint ice road trucking or crab fishing but I bet it would send the wittle pizza-wizza man packing. I bet pizza-wizza man wouldn't complain, however, if all the grocery stores ran out of food (as they do sometimes in a weather catastrophe) and the only place anyone - including insurance adjusters - could find something to eat was at his leeching, parasitical pizza parlor hovering like a vulture over every calamity.

If this line of work has taught me anything it has taught me to be very slow to judge what other people do for a living. Let’s add to that a new level of patience, flexibility, gratitude, grace under pressure, resourcefulness, friendships, and yes, some evil-vibing, bloodstained twenty dollar bills I can withdraw from the bank so I can take my friends out for some pizza-wizza.