I’m pretty sure I have Dengue Fever. Felt a little off today. Took a nap. Not usual for me. No, that doesn’t sound like classic Dengue but I had two liters of blood sucked out of me last night by a phalanx of behemoth mosquitos with an unquenchable thirst for sexay. Between that, eating street fries from a market in Zimbabwe (amidst a Cholera outbreak), a questionable decision or two in South Africa and going for a brief stroll in a sewage trench, if I didn’t catch something SOMEWHERE I’ll need to reevaluate my faculties of risk assessment.
Speaking of reevaluation, let’s subtract the “re” and evaluate your disposition.
The above picture was taken after one of the aforementioned bungee jumps from the footwork bridge of the known. Taciana and Nicola and I (pic below taken at Victoria Falls)
were walking between the raindrops up the sidewalk towards dinner in Livingstone, Zambia, just a haggled cab ride from the spectacular (literally) Victoria Falls, when a mighty bolt split the sky, hit the light pole in front of us and blacked out the entire block (including the restaurant to which we were headed).
Having mistook a driveway for the entrance to the restaurant, I stepped into a shallow puddle on my way back to the street. The shallow puddle turned out to be not a shallow puddle but a two-foot-deep trough filled with brown water and an impressive stench. As one would imagine, I forthwith leapt out of the trench, landing on the sidewalk with soaked blue jeans and a dearth of flip flops, one of which had instantly fastened to the mud at the bottom, the other of which seemed to remain behind with thoughts of a heroic rescue. As the threat of electrocution was rather immediate, I abandoned said flip flops to their fate and we bolted into the blacked-out restaurant, at which time it became known to my friends that I had lost my footwear.
Much to my amazement, the ever-adventurous Nicola, upon hearing this, ventured back out into the night and returned, flip flop in hand. What he had not realized (but was soon apprised of) was that I’d lost BOTH flip flops and back out he went, this time without his phone flashlight, and sought the errant article, but this time to no avail. It likely sits now, hopelessly wedged in the filth, having become a notable feature of that churning muck which stole it from the world. I hear its mate crying softly in the corner as I write this.
All of this is told by the simple picture above, minus some detail suitable to increase word count.
And now a question for you regarding your disposition as measured by your reaction to the photo at the top, taken soon after the event, reproduced here:
When you first saw the photo, was your initial reaction to FOCUS on this:
Or this?
the foot WITH or WITHOUT the flip flop?
Did you FOCUS on my lovely, soft skin or the my discolored toenail?
Which is to say, did you FOCUS on the good or the bad? The space between Big and Fourth toe FULL or EMPTY? Or are you, like most free-thinkers, NOT BINARY? Did you see the picture as a whole? These are important questions and I shall not allow you to slink off without answering them, at least for yourself.
For my part, I shall seek to see each foot as complete, with or without its faux sole. Whereas my nature may be to complain at the first sign of adversity, As travel the world in search of, well, me, I shall endeavor to assign to this event a net positive assessment, if only because it makes for a story. Bad events make good stories if you survive them. For the sake of you, my dear reader, I hope to survive myriad bad events over the coming months, that I may turn my calamities into your procrastination enabler.
And I urge you to do the same. Find the flip flop, AND the lack thereof, equally encouraging.
Thus ends this installment of An Asshole's Guide to Turning Forty-Nine (or Focus)
Until next time...
Thank you for reading. And...
Adieu.