I do not move. I stand facing my front door, frozen in place, and I kind of went deaf for a split second.
It is one of those moments where you just completely blank out and stare into space. Like, having an ice-pick to the back of the brainstem.
Then my mind begins ruminating about every time and place other than the time and place I am in. Times when I go through one shit after another. When it seems like the whole world is out to get me. When things just go awry no matter what I do.
I feel ridiculously compunctious and sorry for myself. Self-deprecating thoughts displaced and blinked on my radar screen. “Aw-Shucks, I should have been more careful.” “Why am I so stupid to have done that.” “Wonder Woman would have fucking saved the day, yet I couldn’t.”
There are countless possible negative shits that can happen to us in a day — from little things like missing a bus, misplacing the keys, uh-oh fly totally undone, pubic entanglement hoodoos — to the completely fucked mishaps like getting into an accident, swallowed by an earthquake, kidnapped by a concupiscent Frankenstein with a hard-on.
Or like what just happened to me, a coffee spill. The utterly messy kind. The kind that falls from 6 feet, making a whistling sound as it drops, and lands with a loud smack on the floor.
My wooden door, all-white walls, slate tiled floor. And my white curtains, not three feet beyond the radius of the epicenter. And the fancy chino pants that I am dressed in. Their once handsome features are now bathed in a fine meshwork of brown-black muck.
Uber-chaos.
And fuck. I am running late for my appointment.
Forget sugar and spice. Indulging in copious lalochezia is the one fucking thing that brings my focus back to the present.
Then I have a brief lapse of clarity.
All this shit can’t murder me. I just gotta chuck it in the fuck-it bucket and move on. Or in this case, clean the fuck up and move on.
Many a time, we are very frightened and feel really doomed. But we got to realize how much isn’t a problem. The remainder isn’t an obstacle either, it’s the path.
So start. Begin small. Itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny small.
I don’t need to magically clean up the whole mess in a snap of a finger with a wand and wondrously teleport to my next venue. Because it isn’t possible.
Instead, small actions toward cleaning up — such as tearing out rolls of toilet paper like a 16-week-old puppy who has just discovered its new toy — lead to the next step, and the next.
The end result: I punch harder, and I get to turn a page.
