life is what happens while you're waiting for the other shoe

You do not know who the f*ck I am. And you know what? Neither do I, if I’m being real. So we have that in common.

Welcome!

So when I was little, I liked to draw rainbows. I would tear off a giant piece of paper and gather all my best markers. I would put everything I needed out on the floor, my tongue hanging out of the corner of my mouth (as it does, er, did, whenever concentration’s required). With the artistic grace of a rhinoceros, I colored at least with passion- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Setting out from the bottom left hand corner of the page, I’d make my way, laboriously, up the page, with what I thought was a pretty good rendition of that glorious multi-colored arc sometimes spotted outside after storms. It was just when I would get to the apex of the arc that I would realize I was already within about an inch or two of the right hand edge of the page. @%#!!

Somehow, all my rainbows turned out this way – they looked good from left to right, until you got to that right-hand side of the page, where my rainbow would take a precipitous ninety-degree turn just as it approached the edge and head down in a fierce straight line to the bottom of the page.

I like now to think of this oddball freak of nature as my crooked rainbow.

What happened in the intervening years is this – LIFE.

Life, people. And this life has been sparklingly beautiful and also shockingly brutal. More on that later. For now, let’s just say – IT’S HARD TO BE A PERSON.

So life happened. Sh*t happened. Trauma happened. And I became a person who used to draw crooked rainbows but now looks at the sky waiting, not for rainbows, but for the other shoe.

The other shoe, in my mind, dangles like goddamn Damocles’ sword.

My crooked rainbow is resiliency incarnate. It is a beautiful thing. A little girl, tongue hanging out of mouth, determined to have a beautiful life.

But the other shoe? The other shoe is my worst enemy. What is it, though, that the stoic philosopher, Seneca said? “We suffer more in imagination than reality.”

That’s what I’m talking about. The other shoe. Even if waiting for that other shoe is like waiting for goddamn Godot. Even if that other shoe is all in my goddamn head. Here we are. And so we wait.

Care to wait with me? I think I can promise it’ll be an interesting ride. Full of mixed metaphors, wack wisdom, alarming analogies, and things that make you go, “Huh.” (That last one should be a song, by the way – preferably a RAP song.)

Pleased to meet you. TTYL.

**One last note, if I may. For optimal entertainment, I recommend reading these posts in chronological order. Go to “BLOG POSTS” option at the top menu of the site, then scroll alllllll the way down, keep scrolling, keep scrolling, then go to where it says, “OLDER POSTS” – click on that and again scroll down, down, down. Feel yourself falling down the rabbit hole, and boom, you’ll find the first post, dated April 29, 2019.**