The Common Sense Assassin

Hitting Snooze




~Alarm bells ringing in your head are yelling, "Don't do it!"  But you can't stop yourself and hit the evilest button that ever lived...

Those bells weren't loud when I was a kid. If they had been, I wouldn't have tried learning how to ride a bike with no brakes and handlebars that spun all the way 'round. There were some spectacular crashes. Fortunately, no broken bones, just lots of blood. And while the wipeouts scared me, my mom chasing after me with the bacterial spray and a worried expression scared me more. It's kinda why I walked around with a stick in my kneecap for a month after an unfortunate game of kickball. Seriously, no one should play that game in the mulch!

After one painful/humiliating/embarrassing lesson after another, wisdom strolls in. Late to the party, but baring gifts. It makes you realize that sticking your finger in the filter at the bottom of the pool or climbing onto the flimsiest branches of the tree next to the driveway is idiotic. Luckily, I never had to use the roof of my brother's car as an airbag. 

Wisdom and I? We weren't on the best of terms.

When you have an overly active imagination, you aren't poking your finger in the pool filter just to be stupid. You are trying to find out if monsters are really living under the pool or if lost treasure had somehow worked its way down there. I did find a couple of rocks mom had warned us not to throw into the pool, though. And climbing trees? It wasn't about how high I could get. Trees were skyscrapers, and I was the secret agent spying on the master thief disguising his getaway car. Okay, fine. It was my dad washing his station wagon. But when my thoughts take a hard left, I go with it.

But, eventually, wisdom and I shook hands. It's been an on-again, off-again relationship. My emotional side occasionally wins over common sense. Common sense, of course, being wisdom's assassin, assigned to kill ill-conceived ideas my buddy spontaneous conjures up. Unfortunately for wisdom, my enthusiasm is reasonably adept at losing common sense. And, that is why, somewhere between climbing a waterfall and hiking through a bamboo forest, I lost wisdom on the day before my wedding. Why else would I decide to take a trip on a flying lawnmower? 

Okay. Technically, it was a powered hang-glider, but it felt like a lawn chair strapped to a lawnmower. Had wisdom not been suffering from a slight sunburn, it would have been chanting through its parched lips that I would be the one under the lawn before too long. My rationalization for flying 2,000 feet in the air on a death trap was: If I don't die today, I will marry you tomorrow! Yup. I wantonly left common sense twisting in the wind that day. Some people take these types of events in stride. I'm not the biggest fan of flying in a plane---or sitting in a little cage on one of those 'why the hell did I get on this' ferris wheel. I'll admit it. I'm a tiny bit (read: massively) afraid of heights. So, even without common sense stabbing my adventurous spirit through the heart...why do it?

As strange as it sounds, I trusted my story wasn't going to end that day. At that moment, I let opportunity and impulse guide me and took a chance. Just like I'm taking chances with writing, trusting the story leads to uncharted territory, riding on the wings of untethered ideas and soaring over erupting volcanoes of character, plot, and motive. And even though my hands are clamped tightly to the too-small seat of the glider, I'm thrusting inspiration into my flight suit so I can safely land with it all onto a runway of pages.





Drop me a note & receive an email notification when a new a post is published.

Name

Email *

Message *

Popular Posts