Stick With Your Brand, Or Else

Bow Tie o’ the Day and I scurried off to sit in Suzanne’s office and stare at her while she ate her yogurt for lunch. I drank two cans of Fresca from Suzanne’s personal office refrigerator, cuz the Diet Coke I had left in my car overnight was still frozen solid. Ya can’t drink something the consistency of a brick. Thus, I gulped the flowing, free Fresca available to me. Tasty-riffic, but…

Apparently, I’m not acclimated to the side effects of Fresca consumption, because my face has been stuck like this since I drank the first sip. That drinking happened six hours ago, and this mischievous expression just keeps hanging across my face. What’s even weirder is that I think this photo looks more like me than I usually look like myself.

Think on that idea for a minute. It’s as if– due to my reaction to a relatively small dose of Fresca– my face finally got stuck in its “true” look. Has Diet Coke disguised my own face from me and y’all for all these decades? Can I only reach my full Helen-potential if I switch to the “true” Fresca?

And here I go, down The Existential Sinkhole o’ Questions (TESo’Q). You know the one. You fall into it every now and again, when some occurrence or another discombobulates you. The questions are the same for us all: Who am I? What is my purpose? Where is all the Chapstick I’ve lost? Should I have done x, instead of doing y? Should I stay or should I go? Who’s yer daddy? What happens if I forget to forget that I forgot to not forget something I forgot I meant to never forget? Why am I here? Have I wasted my life? What’s my stripper name?

See there? That’s how The Existential Sinkhole o’ Questions can give you a headache. Once you start with your “bigly” existential questions, you can get yourself easily mired down in them, to the point you don’t actually go out and do your living. You can waste time treading water in the swirling TESo’S questions for years on end. Try to avoid that. Try to drive right past that nasty TESo’Q, if at all possible.

And if you wanna be a compassionate person about all this TESo’Q biz, here’s what you can do: After every time you pull yourself out of The Existential Sinkhole o’ Questions, surround the sinkhole with orange traffic cones, so others can more easily avoid taking the grungy plunge. Oh, and help pull them free of the dastardly pit when they ignore the traffic cones you laid out so thoughtfully for their benefit.

Admit it. None of us pays attention to the orange traffic cones all the time. That would be smart. We’re not smart: we’re people.