apologies to a porcupine

.

I woke up this morning as prickly as a porcupine. I looked forward to a day I did not look forward to...and I wanted something pleasant to look forward to. Everything seemed to be covered in a cranky sheen.

Laundry? Fuck that! Aches and pains -- fuck that! Cleaning up behind others who could not put their dishes in the dishwasher? Fuck that! Fix the lamp that had (again!) showed itself as needing fixing? Fuck that! Cooking? Fuck that! Shovel the snow the weatherman promised? Fuck that! Be good-natured? Fuck that!

Chore after chore presented itself as a stupid revision of something that had not been done right in the first place. Everything was stale and offered no novelty or delight. Stale and stupid ... and don't try to talk me out of it with some feel-good spiritual bullshit, some serene analysis, some hallowed and haloed hope. I wanted something fresh and creative and bright -- something that brought with it a renewed sense of purpose and delight ... and not just be sweeping up behind the delights that had presented themselves in the past.

All of this hung in my mind like some silent-but-deadly fart under the covers. I wanted someone to tell me a good dirty joke. I wanted to win some unnamed lottery, to be surprised, to be free from ... whatever it was I was mired in. Stale and stupid, stale and stupid, stale and stupid.

And then, as I began to write this entry, I looked around for a picture of a porcupine that would depict my prickly, pissed-off mood and found the picture above. And before I could help myself, I smiled and felt a little guilty. No porcupine deserves to be burdened with my crabby shit. Porcupines are just porcupines and they are pretty nifty-looking critters. They go about their waddling business. I suppose they must get pissed off now and then, but generally speaking they are prickly just because they are prickly. It's the nature of the beast. They don't make anything out of it, I imagine.

So why do I?

My apologies to the porcupine.
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