Before And After
One of my favorite authors has lately been telling her life as a kind of “before and after” story. This is probably fairly common in the wake of a traumatic event; life is seen as merely the innocence (before) and the suffering (after) which surround the Happening.
I can totally identify with this, as I have experienced the same thing. But I’ve also noticed: once that before-time innocence is destroyed, ensuing events in life have a much taller order to fill in becoming a Happening of equal import, even if, on paper, they are roughly equivalent in expected emotional impact.
It’s a Nietzschean whatever-does-not-kill-me kind of deal. It works. I touched on the issue in an old poem called “Blackjack Politics“, which likely makes no sense. But the image of the weighted doll is that Nietzschean phenom I am talking about.
This post probably doesn’t make any sense either. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to this uplifting photo of me with our Christmas tree from 2006.
