Dodging Raindrops

Essays

Aug 6

The phone rings again. The visual voicemail says it’s Steve from another real estate lead source. Steve can get me the best leads at a lower cost. Steve is a shill. Everything is a bait-and-switch in this game. I never answer my phone. It’s a digital mailbox, but everyone is the new mailman, leaving pamphlets and coupons among the market circulars and fake corporate annual reports.

Life is rarely a box of chocolates. Maybe it would be if everything wasn’t pinging and buzzing all the time. Maybe we could still concentrate. Life is a box, inside of another box, one with a heavy metal soundtrack and no headphones available, with a seven-year-old boy sitting in the corner in a propeller hat gently chiming a cymbal.

People want to talk, but I have nothing to say. Most things in life are fairly self-evident if we do just a small modicum of work. Then there is abstract art. Don’t expect to know, just look. Look at the shape and angles of the car on the side of the road with a bent front fender and hard smash through a headlight. There is something to behold there.

I walk around my block in the same way almost every day. When I reverse my direction, I feel like a kid trying Baseball Nut for the first time at Baskin Robbins. It was always there. I always liked baseball. But did I want to eat baseball nuts? I found that I did. I wanted to eat Baseball Nut very much. Rocky Road became a stepchild.

I was a stepchild. My stepbrothers were stepchildren. Half-time here, half-time there. Two rooms. Actually, I never really had a room at my dad’s. I just had a bed in my stepbrother’s room. I guess that was okay. My room at my mom’s was my haven. No child needs two havens. I had nightmares at my mom’s. I thought Creepshow was under my bed at my dad’s.

Have you ever run quickly through the rain? It’s a ridiculous prophecy, but we do it. I do it. Sometimes, I walk slowly, and I feel like I could be drier. The world has no reference manual for how not to get wet when it is raining. I don’t like umbrellas. They look stupid. If we are meant to be barefoot, we are certainly meant to walk in the rain without a spoked high hat.

The phone rings, again. The visual voicemal says it’s Rachel from a leads company for real estate agents. Rachel is better than everyone else and can prove it. Rachel is a shill. Call waiting comes in. It’s Andy. Andy is from an SEO company that can upgrade my website so I can be found better online. Andy doesn’t know I’ve always been trying to hide. I’ve spent my life dodging raindrops.