Today is a great day, dear reader.  Not in the saccharine, Instagrammable, “live laugh love” horseshitty sense of the phrase, but in a way a thunderclap is great, or a freight train derailing into a fireworks factory is great – loud, messy, and absolutely unignorable.  Today is a great day because the sky over Anhedonia County has finally cracked open like a long-suffering ulcer, hemorrhaging a steady, blessed rain onto the parched bones of The Creek.  The gutters are gurgling like drunks in a confession booth, the air smells like wet asphalt and ozone, and the squirrels are losing their tiny minds.  It’s glorious.

Second, and this is not a drill, today is November 13th, the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson – patron saint of duality, chronicler of pirates, and the man who taught us that every respectable gentleman has a snarling, libidinal monster just beneath the waistcoat.  Raise a glass of laudanum-laced absinthe in his honor, or at least mutter a curse at the mirror and see who blinks first.

But the third reason is the real meat of the matter, both literal and metaphysical.  The McRib is back.  Yes.  That unholy slab of reconstituted pork slurry, shaped like a rack of ribs by someone who’s only ever seen ribs in a dream, slathered in a sauce so sweet it could double as embalming fluid.  It’s back.  And I, for one, have already eaten two.  Possibly three.  I blacked out somewhere between the second and the third and woke up with barbecue sauce on my collar and a vague sense of spiritual renewal.

There’s something about the McRib’s seasonal resurrection that feels like a pagan rite – like Persephone clawing her way out of the underworld, except she’s made of pork and corn syrup and corporate nostalgia.  It’s a culinary Brigadoon, a meat mirage that appears just long enough to remind us that joy is fleeting, and then vanishes again into the marketing ether.  You don’t eat a McRib because it’s good.  You eat it because it’s back.  You eat it because you’re alive, dammit, and because the rain is falling, and because Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about a man who turned into a beast and you, too, feel the beast stirring when you smell that tangy, smoky perfume wafting from the Golden Arches.

So yes, today is a great day.  The sky is weeping, the dead are remembered, and the McRib is back.  It that’s not enough to make you howl at the clouds and dance barefoot in the mud, then brother, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here.

Now go forth.  Eat recklessly.  Write dangerously.  And if you see me in The Creek, sauce-stained and grinning like a pervert, just nod and keep walking.  Some days are too good to explain.

N.P.: “Simple Life” – Elton John