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Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Can you hear me now? It’s pathetic, really, that after millions of years of evolution those words are how I opened this thought. Do jokes and jingles trump King Solomon? Is there really nothing new under the sun?

Of course, with a flick of a finger across a screen you could in fact be reading this text now as you wait for your delayed flight to take you up, up and away in a metal balloon. That’s all a jet airplane is, really. First you’re at ground level, then you’re at thirty-thousand feet, and then you’re back on the ground. Still, kind of amazing.

So, Mr. Smartypants Ecclesiastes, how do you like them apples?

And yet, my earnest conviction is that deep down in our DNA or maybe in our soul - you can call it whatever you want to - most of those apples are little more than a patina on very old bronze. On the other hand, in our current era, we are indeed very fixated on the patina. Could it be that our level of smug self-satisfaction with our clever tools and toys is a new thing?

We - and I mean those of us who are alive in the twenty-first century, CE, those of us who have water out of a tap, light and A/C out of a wire, and information and entertainment coming and going via satellite - we are indeed rich relative to all of our human ancestors.  We are awash in information and gadgets in this era of the human race, and yet – and yet, I ask: who among us is making substantial sense out of all of this? Mr. Solomon, what say you? Who can say what all this stuff means for the human race?

If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t be putting my money on the preachers or the politicians or the pundits or the prognosticators to be making very much sense of it all. I think I’d go with the comedians and the song writers. Laughter and tears often remain the best indicators of truth, in my book.

So, what is real? And what is dross?

Descartes walks into a bar.

Bartender asks: can I make you a whiskey sour?

Descartes replies: I think not – and promptly vanishes.

Mostly dross – by my own measure. But something in that joke was real, I think. But still my question about stuff and nonsense remains mostly unanswered.