See Me Glitter From Behind

You’d have to wonder why I failed science at school, when, after more than twenty years, I can remember pithy sayings such as ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’. That stuck in my head, and now that I google it, appears to be Newton’s third law of motion. Maybe I failed because I completely forgot the first, second, fourth and any other laws.

Digressing. So just thinking that nothing is as easy as opting for one direction; one course of action. As much as I try to wrangle those unbroken horses into submission, they produce bucking and rearing from places I would never have expected. Just as I think I am going to canter off into the sunset with Tonto at my side and the town’s folk slappin themselves on the back and wondering who that masked stranger was, I find myself lying on my back outside the saloon with the undertaker measuring me for a plywood box, and a chain-gang gouging a hole in the dirt for my shattered body.

I’d love to have my eyes peeled and in the back of my head, but I figure I’d still get ambushed and circled and outgunned. Problem is, I can’t sit out in the field with the tumbleweeds and rattlers, I feel compelled to head into town and face off the baddies with their immaculate black hats and gloves, and their skewed sense of justice.

Being a defender of the underdog is great if you are capable of defending. Not so great when you just add to the body count. So you can choose good over evil, and yet it seems to put you in line for even more attack. You decide to stop some stuff, and do things differently, but then discover that instead of finding a neatly mown path through the forest, you are crushed under the weight of some randomly falling tree. You leap out of the trenches in the hope that this time you’ll break through enemy lines, and instead you get turned into spaghetti sauce by stray machine-gun fire. You choose the road less traveled, and find it is less traveled for a reason. Stupid road doesn’t register on any GPS systems, and disappears off a cliff. And still you have to do it. Despite the likelihood that you’ll end up shipwrecked, you can’t stand on the dock waving goodbye to other people all the time. There may be dragons, but there may be fantastic things to see and do before they get you. Please tell me you get the flaming point and that the cauldron does not need me to add any more mixed metaphors?

Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, mine seems to be planted squarely in another part of my anatomy, and, on closer inspection, is only plated silver.

All that’s left is safety in numbers. Hanging out with people also too scared to sit down owing to cutlery-related disfigurements. We shuffle and jingle our crooked paths through this world, drifting to the edge of the herd every now and then to provide a sacrifice to the prowling beasts without, so that our maimed and damaged posse of dysfunction can plod nervously and randomly towards destruction.