Life Is An Accident; One Frog Could Make a Difference, and Why I Can't Find My Socks.

Before people freak out, I had nothing to do with the accident to the right - I was just riding by, saw it and snapped it. I'm alive, all limbs are attached, and my brain is firing on high octane sugar activated caffeinated water, though it's on the second wind.¹ And if you read enough prose like Darwin wrote - as in style - eventually something snaps, and you just need to do something semi-creative. I'm certain Darwin was intelligent, but if I were force-fed a diet of academic papers and formal writing like that, I would begin to question the existence of a Supreme Being.²

That's humor, in case you don't recognize it.

Life is an accident. Mine is. There are days where I feel like Arthur Dent, jumping in and out of a pond that thinks it's a body of gin while I pretend I'm an olive. A stuffed olive. In, out, repeat as necessary. At the end of the day, the pond is still there and so am I. The odds are that the pond outlasts me, but I'm doing my level best to diminish those odds one splash at a time.

Splash.

I live in a world where Amazon.com recommends a Samsung 23" Widescreen HDTV-Ready Flat-Panel LCD TV and Penrose's 'The Road to Reality '. TV and a side order of natural laws of the universe. Meanwhile, in the late 90s, I picked up One Frog Can Make A Difference: Kermit's Guide To Life in the '90s. Probably one of the more useful books I read in the 90s, and I read quite a few (thousand). Consider this:

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Frogs

...
1. A quick tongue doesn't get tangled. (Say that three times fast.)
2. Look before you leap.
3. The early frog catches the worm.
4. A hop in time saves nine.
5. He who croaks last croaks the longest.
6. Always try to stay out of a pig's way.
7. Remember: A toad may be somebody's mother.

Number 6 is the real kicker. Life is full of pigs. If they're not trying to eat your share, they're leaving something behind to step in. It's not a rat-race or a 'dog eat dog' world. It's a pigsty. Watch your step and acquire a taste for bacon. Hop,hop,hop.

My mother wrote a poem over a decade ago, about nuclear energy and my placement of my socks in my toybox. Well, socks are generally misunderstood by mothers. They like the toybox. I've never quite figured out what this social apparel is for aside from showing people that you are willing to coat your feet with a material. If someone can come up with a reason as to why they wear socks other than the fact that everyone else wears them, I'd like to know.³

As everyone's parents tell them, 'If everyone else jumps off a cliff...'. Yeah. Your mother wants you wearing clean underwear if you're in an accident - and if she ever says that, ask her about your socks. 'What about my socks? Should I have clean socks too?'

If you're in a good accident, you won't have clean underwear. To date, with broken bones floating in my back and a history of assorted cracks and dings, I've never been in a good accident by that rule. I've been in some bad ones. Bad ones where every move for the next few weeks hurts. But you keep moving, even without hope. Just a stubborn will. You don't make it go away - you just make it irrelevant.

I can't ever find my socks because I rarely wear them, because they are largely irrelevant.

Life has dark periods, like staying up all night. At the darkest hours, if you just stay at it and stay focused, sooner or later the darkness becomes irrelevant. Sooner or later, the sun comes up - you can measure time in minutes if you want, but time really comes in degrees during the dark hours. In the dark hours, if you get distracted, you end up noticing it's still dark. If you keep checking, you keep noticing it's still dark, and the degree of perceived darkness increases.

And so it goes, no matter what it is. The pigs eat, the pigs leave their evidence behind, and sooner or later they eat each other.⁴

Sooner or later, the sun comes up again. At least, that's what we all hope for, especially in our darkest hours. Some call it faith. Some call it being stubborn, or tenacious, or hard headed. Some even mistakenly call it being 'pig-headed'.

And if the sun doesn't come up? Well, if it's irrelevant, it really doesn't matter too much... does it?⁵

In fact, you could work right through a sunrise and miss it if you're not careful. That's why you need people around you to tell you when your sun's rising, a nudge, a touch, that transcends the cacophony of other's screaming about their own sun. Just a tap. Sometimes the sun just isn't bright enough to catch your attention when all you have to cling to is the thought of it. Down that path lies insanity.

Focusing on every breath, you wait for the tap. And that's how you get things done. You might be like a nuclear submarine, able to produce your own oxygen and water. But nothing replaces the sun.

Don't ever ask for the sun, because then it becomes as relevant as it really is.⁶

Just wait for the tap, one breath at a time.

¹ Second wind is what the brain gets when it passes a certain number of hours without sleep, much like when an athlete gets their second wind.
² But I'm not worried about the existence of a Supreme Being. If you believe there is one, can we agree that by now the Supreme Being should be able to ride a bicycle without training wheels by now. That's the fatal flaw I find in most religious zealot arguments - a one way relationship with the supreme being of their choice...
³ The reason is to wick sweat away from the feet, but if you have shoes that breathe right, you don't need the things.
⁴They're not very discerning creatures. Oddly, humans have an anatomy very much like pigs. Some say it's the other way around.
⁵ Jedi Mind Trick 101.
⁶ Jedi Mind Trick 102.