‘Lo.

I am just going to go ahead right now and apologize for that weird title.  I am not really sure what i meant by it or where I was even going with it when it started to pour out of my mouth.  But like old cotton candy, sometimes you just gotta clean things out of your rust bucket.  Yuh nah mean?

It comes to my attention that I haven’t written in this free-flowing form in several years.  A three year span to be exact.  Do you know that is the length of time it takes a scorpion to fully mature?  The last time I wrote on this thing, there were a bunch of eggs, or cocoons, or laser-beams, or love clouds, or whatever it is that scorpions utilize to gestate, lying about, just about ready to spit forth a bunch of six legged buggers into this world.  Now usually, the ideas of babies brings a smile to your ear and a twinkle to an old fellow’s face, but in this case, in the case of tiny, terrifying little scorpion hell-spawn, we can all agree that cute is not exactly an appropriate word to describe them.  Baby Panda, cute as a sack of marbles.  Baby Hippo, fat and squeeze-worthy, like cotton balls.  See a baby octopus, probably cute.  That one is hypothetical, because I have never seen a baby octopus, but I’d imagine it might look bearable.

But if I see a baby scorpion, man, and I am just looking for the nearest chopstick to smash that thing into the dirt like a new batch of rhododendrons.  Despite that, those little babies, the ones that avoided being planted east-Asia style, in the time since last I have graced this locale with my tail-feather prose, have grown up to be fully-matured Scorpi-sans with jobs, and mortgages, and cholesterol worries, trying to find little six-legged business suits to go on job interviews and stuff.  Which also strikes me as sad, Because a scorpion, being all legs, doesn’t really have much of a torso in which to rock out with a nice button up.  He can’t pick out shirts in his favorite color, or whether or not horizontal striped shirts make his carapace look fat.  His tie would drag the ground, too, and no one, not the Queen of Tibet to Tofu the Birthday Panda, like dirt-scuffed ties.  Man, no wonder they are pissed and always trying to sting people and stuff.  They just want to look dapper in tiny little suits, like little Arachnid James Bonds.  Since they get into everything they want, they would probably have made good 00 agents.  Opportunity missed, SIS.

One last thought about Scorpos:  I have no idea what they actually eat, or if they even have mouths.  I mean, i assume they do, and with Google they way it is these days, (The God That Answers Your Questions in less than .00007 seconds) I could easily find out.  But I don’t want to.  I’d like to propose that they don’t eat traditional food, but instead are like tiny, angry, be-stingered Dementors, sucking the happiness from everyone in the room like that chunky Basset Hound that poops on the ottoman at your Aunt Helen’s Christmas party when everyone else was opening presents.

If I was a celebrity I wonder about the people who would be compared to looking like me, and if I ever actually met them, if I would think they looked like me too.  I would probably give them some pretty sweet high-fives if the resemblance was close, and if it was damn uncanny i think I would give them a coupon book to Denny’s or something.  Because that seems like something you should share with your doppelganger, a fat stack of flap-jacks and sunny-side-up-ers under condensed florescent lighting while deliberating all the reasons that people find it important to compare themselves to celebrities.  We might reach an insightful decision about the state of Oil Prices in Syria, just stumbling upon that shit like ice cream stands as we compare the convex angles of my nose as opposed to the concavity of their Rome-a-dome schnoggin and somehow ephiphanating our way to solve Fossil Fuel fretting.  Then, at long last as the last, as the few drops of remaining syrup have dried on porcelain-chipped plates, we would part ways, probably with another sweet murder mystery high-five to keep in our pockets to keep us warm on the way home.

I really appreciate having color-vision.  I think of tube TVs back in the day, that had just the black and whites, or a terrible blend of another, murkier, reddish color, kind of how a dog sees.  That’s what we should have called early-color television sets, Dog-Sight TVs.  It is far catchier, and we already would have had a brand mascot to throw into the cable car.  Another opportunity missed, SIS.  I don’t really know how this is British Intelligence’s fault, but I feel like if anyone could have solved this issue before afternoon tea, it would have been those crafty buggers.  After all, they were the ones who invented sarcasm and cats.

I really miss Greek food.  It isn’t really something you get in the confounded country, unless you make it.  And since I have all the culinary savoir faire of a constipated rhinoceros swinging a turkey baster, my Grecian delicieuse meter is frankly, officially FUBARed.  Goodbye hummus. Auf Wiedersehen Baklava. Gyro, I never knew how in the nine hells I was supposed to say you, but you pleased me every time you graced me with your awkwardly-spelled presence. I will always remember you.  If I ever am on a sinking ship, I will shout your praises to excess until someone steals my one size fits all, shoulder inflated flotation device, leaving me for the tuna fish.

Which brings me to my next point. Inadequacies of the human condition.  But before that, random shout out to AB.  You taught me so many things, not least of which was how to say the word “boat” in Japanese, so I could shout at those random Japanese passerby that our’s was full of eels as we churned down rapids.  It wasn’t, but that didn’t stop either of us.

Ok, back to Inadequacies.  I find, in my rickety mid-20’s, that I really, REALLY don’t know how to do a lot of shit.  Like how to flambe something.  Or even what flambeing something even entails.  Based on context clues, I have the smallest inkling it has to do with fire… but let’s be honest, I’m probably woefully incorrect.  I won’t google it.  Where is the fun in being told the answer to every question the instant I ask it?

I don’t know how to use superglue without getting some of that crap on my fingers, that just lasts there, annoying me…for DAYS.  I don’t know to draw a map of Paris, how to hold a baby penguin, how to appropriately sharpen a knife, how to build a proper tree fort, to this day, how to see ANYTHING in a magic eye picture besides blurry nonsense, how to find more than a handful of constellations, how to sit in silence, being comfortable in my own skin, how to make gravy, how to change the oil in my car, how to do a proper backstroke, how to whistle with my fingers, and the list just goes on and on.

Does this lack of knowledge, or experience, or knife-side know-how, make me any less of a substantial human being?  Am I less for not knowing more?

My honest answer? No.  Am I simply saying that because I have more holes in my life-experience than a termite-riddled carving of swiss cheese? I don’t think so.  What I am, what’s making up the make up of being me, is just as much in harmony with those many things I can’t do, as well as all those things I can.  So many times I hear that I should embrace my strengths and ignore my weaknesses, or at the very best, try and improve them, but secretly, in private, like I’m cheating on everything I’m good at with the saucy mistress of all the things I’m not.

But I say, to hell with that notion.  Last night I had a dream that it was raining at this guys cliff-side carnival, turning all the paths into mudslides, which was awesome until we got to the cliff’s edge, 10,000 feet of jungle-strewn vertigo scattered before me like moldy dust motes.  Careening on the edge, I was terrified to move because I didn’t know how to fly.  I didn’t think to stand up, scrabble, or even crawl away from the brink.  I ignored all the things I could have done based on those I couldn’t.  I didn’t make it to safety, but neither did I die.  I sat there, covered in mud, and listened to my heartbeat for what felt like days.

My point, I think, in my roundabout Brocish way, is that you shouldn’t focus on only what you can do, ignoring what you can’t, but neither should you try and constantly improve on all those things you are terrible at, taking for granted those things that make you smile because of how adequate they make you feel.  And adequate is always enough.  But it isn’t your strengths that make you feel adequate, neither is it what you have left in you to improve, that drive to become something more than yourself.

It is you.  Your calloused hands and fallen dreams, awkward knees and shriveled eyelashes, tattooed shoulders and riddled stretch marks.  It is what you are.

Everything you will ever need to be perfectly content in your life, you already have right now, at this very moment.  All that other nonsense is tertiary, as vestigial to your serenity as your deprecating issues of self.  Anything telling you otherwise is the exact reason why you aren’t.

I can’t steer with my knees, but I can tie my shoes while I drive.

I can’t sing.  But I can smile.

I can’t fly. But I can stand.

Its not what I can do, versus what I can’t.

It.

is.

what.

I.

am.