"A Time To Cast Away Stones…"

Sometimes I grow weary of reading blogs, my own included. I'm sure you must feel the same way once in a while. I wonder if I'm wasting precious time writing and keeping up with predictable blogs that serve up the same old "hash" every day. "Predictability" belongs in a lab or classroom or on the girl next door—the one your mom wanted you to marry.

"She'll be good for you—settle you down."
"To what, Mom, a predicable life with predictable kids and predicable pets, neighborhood, mortgage? Should I go ahead and  preplan my funeral too? I'd like to leave things to chance—live dangerously—you know skip a colonoscopy, eat a greasy steak." 

When a book gets predictable I put in down. When I get predictable I put myself down. When my blog gets predictable it should be put down (they shoot horses, don't they?). Predictability is something I've tried to avoid; being different was all I really had going for me—not so cool in high school, parking a slant-six Dodge Dart with racing stripes and three-on-the-column next to Mustangs and Cameros. 

I came from unpredictable parents... had an unpredictable son (these things run in families) and drove unpredictable vehicles most of my life. A '66 Jimmy pickup got me to this unpredictable dot on a map with unpredictable weather and people.

I've suffered unpredictable loss and unpredictable joy. I've climbed unpredictable mountains, dodged unpredictable lightning, rafted unpredictable rivers with unpredictable waters. One fine spring day on the Colorado River, just below the power plant, a class four section of ice water rapids sucked me through a sudden, gaping gash in the raft's floorboard. I was swallowed up like Jonah, in the belly of a recirculating wave, pinned to the bottom and shuddering like a rag doll in a hurricane. I fought to save myself—to escape the mega force of undertow. Seconds felt like hours. Finally I surrendered and waited for merciful unconsciousness to take me away. "So this it how it ends?"

 Peculiar how bears and rapids spit you out like rotten meat once you give in and play dead. A too small life jacket popped me to the surface. I gasped a mixture of pure air and muddy water, and bobbed out the remaining rapid with arms and legs leadened by exertion and deadened by snowmelt. Once out of the Colorado's main thrust, too weak to stand, I crawled on hands and knees through pebbled shallows while shedding layers of heavy wet clothing that doubled gravity. Bobbie was somewhere downstream fighting to save herself with a death grip on an oar anchor... floating along on the outside of a half deflated raft. 

That was then; this is now. Currently I'm knee deep in predicability, beige as a spec home, pale as blue john, stagnant as a Kansas pig farm pond. I want to cut and run—it's my M. O. after all—but that would be predicable, wouldn't it. Besides, my "horse" has a broken leg. Whattaya gonna to do.
"They shoot horses don't they?"

Maybe this is how it ends. Maybe some thing must die before something new takes its place. Maybe it's time to "cast away stones." And maybe, this is how it begins...