I work very close to the new Enron Corp. The shell company is basically still trying to sell off some of Enron’s assets and every day I think: it’s so close. I could just stroll over there, see if the E is anywhere to be found. So today I actually did it.
After lunch, I went to the building and carefully, discreetly, looked up the company on the matrix:
Then I rode up up up in the elevator:
And I found it. There was no E. There was just this:
Suddenly I felt cold inside. I thought of that phrase: history repeating itself.
If history repeats itself, it is still the same history: more repetition, no history.
Because it is the same history. The same hysteria. Nothing inside that office had anything that I wanted. Inside was the fresh machine of repetition, lies, the grinding gridwork of an apparatus that will perpetuate the same information over and over and over.
The one I do not talk about – - in the beginning he said to me that he wished I could forget that he worked at Enron. I told him I would love him even if he was a waiter at my favorite 50s diner.
I suddenly thought of that as I left, and I felt a strangely pure joy — joy from knowing that the machine is still spinning with the same information. You see him on the news, frozen in time. But he, like all of them, is so much more than that. History is not repeating. I have the history, the history every single day, and it is in full-color and it is beautiful.
