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Hey Reader,
In last week’s epilogue, I promised a crackling quirky love story. But on the eve of commemorating the 40th anniversary of my brother’s death, due to senseless violence, my heart was engulfed by a graver tinsel. Like the .001% of us who have been creatively nourished by ancestors who maintained their authentic voices by being as transparent as Saran Wrap, I’d be disingenuous at best to ‘play in your face’ like a social media influencer, only revealing the sunshine of my life. So join me for a quick metaphorical jaunt through the subtext of my context. Laced with survival pivots, dressed up like chivalrous acts. Names are omitted to protect the weak and equally aching; and places are obscured because I wasn’t vibrating at a frequency to perceive their value at the time. This soul dump intends to infuse hope into the hopeless, without inducing pity or guilt.
As the protagonist of my own ‘terrestrial odyssey’, I amble through my plot line dripping in sparkling flaws and unrequited needs, courtesy of my shadow side. While maintaining a game face that Halle, Meryl and Oscar would envy, I am buoyed by a fragile redemption theme, with a quest to tell stories that make enough people ‘feel some kinda way’, so I can retire in a foreign land where the sun shines at least 300 days of the year — and the language is easy.
Around the midpoint of my narrative, after I survived the shark-infested waters amongst schools of fear-driven fish who don’t know they’re wet (bookmark that for a later episode), I encountered a deranged network exec (who thought he was a wizard) who sent me off to fetch a rusty ass vacuum cleaner, while a whole team of villains and sorcerers gnawed at my knees. My only sustenance during a brief respite, was a feast of live grenades and barbed-wire salads, served up by grinning shapeshifting ‘frenemies’. So I thought the guardian angel that showed up was just another winged monkey, and I dashed off the nearest cliff, landing face down in a puddle of my dreams deferred.
Choking on crimson chards of a shattered heart, I convinced myself that self-loathing was my only protection, and I stashed my body into hiding. A snow-laden suburb of northeastern America was the ideal world to mirror the despair fueling the end of my second act. Hiking along what once were Native American trails, now gentrified parks, where tiny orange mushrooms communed in villages, I began to plant seeds of hope.
Causing me to muster up just enough gumption to want to believe again. Like Luke Skywalker and Dorothy Gale, I knew that the only way to escape this nightmare was a u-turn inward. So I clicked the heals of my leather Converse, picked up my light saber (I mean my pen) and kicked into act three, determined to write my way out out. Trying not to contrive the revelation that unearthing a painfully abandoned gift, is indeed what prepares you for the journey’s climax. A freelance gig adapting a book into a podcast script appeared like that dove with a branch in its beak after the great flood.
But Screwtape and his gang of henchmen, were not going to abandon their mission to annihilate the fragile chrysalis of my metamorphosis just because I “wanted” to believe my “all is lost” sequence was at its end. Evidenced by this photo I took, as I peered out the window, restraining myself from wheezing at the mailman, “Did anythang come for me”?, like Celie, in The Color Purple. For days, I waited despondently for that check-in-the-mail that would restore my coffers. All because the high-salaried executive assigned to my project wasn’t familiar with the company’s electronic payment system. So I had to commit to full transformation, and snatch another hidden talent from under the bushel. Vowing never to go hungry again, (declared to hiking trail pine trees solely for cathartic effect), I conceived and launched a workshop, that not only generated me some nice cash, but also helped one of my students raise money for her project and recently win an Emmy. As the credits rolled on my cacophony of angst, I could hear my great-grandmother whispering in my ear during the wee hours of the morning, “Everything ain’t about you, Child. That valley you in, could be bearing fruit for somebody else to be fed.” Ancestral mic drop.
Fictitious album, “Anything Come for Me, Today?” was generated by self-anointed ‘neo-futuristic, multi-versal creator’, Mother Duck, who again shatters the genre box with her latest collection of sounds & visions. From her “Silent Music” videos featuring her all-gal band, The Seed, pillow fighting in slow motion, wearing pink pajamas in a blizzard of white feathers, to improvising ‘Kraftwerk-like’ techno melodies during their sold-out “Save the Post Office” concerts, Mother Duck intends to dominate screens and speakers of all sizes far beyond this parenthesis in eternity.
I hope you enjoyed my latest “Imaginary Bands…” missive. Next time I’ll serve up that sullen little love song. In the meantime, CLICK HERE to check out my eZine of photographs before they became mythological album covers, featuring a link to order cards and prints. Only available for a limited time.
Until our next rendezvous, Be thankful in all things!
Carolyn
