They want to be my friends and I am accepting their requests. I want to kiss them on and in their lips.
They want me to sign up for a service with a misspelled double entendre in the URL.
It's free but I have to input my credit card info.
I cunningly slip my card back into my wallet.
Nothing is free in this life.
I have had it all and lost everything. I am haunted by my failure.
In the mid-90s, I was the CEO of Dannon. Some hot shot from an Ivy League university pitched the idea of making animal-themed yogurts. We'd call them "Danimals." The boardroom was getting really into it.
Kids are gonna love this, they hooted.
I didn't get it.
I slammed my powerful fist on the table.
"I'm the boss of this yogurt company and I say no," I hollered. They could feel the violence in my tone. Everyone cowered underneath the desk - except the hot shot giving the presentation. Her conviction was resolute as ever.
I gave her my most alpha of glares.
She smiled at me sweetly and I swear I felt a cool breeze pass across my cheek.
I tried to mention something about probiotics for an older demographic being a wiser choice and faltered. I stumbled and fell to the floor. Murmurs spread across the boardroom as the once frightened board members came out of hiding.
I accept a friend request from a half naked woman standing in front of a Honda Civic. I think about the past, my own personal prison of memories I carry with me wherever I go. These days I mostly go inside my house.
I look out the window.
I see a young child walking with his mother.
I loved yogurt when I was a kid. I used to ask my mom to buy me piña colada-flavored Yoplait every time we went to the grocery store. Then they came out with coconut creme pie flavor and I switched to that.
It was all I ate until they discontinued it. My dad joked that doing so was a "coconut crime pie." I didn't see the humor in this at all.
The unfairness of it all made me very upset. The piña colada was never the same after that.
When I was a kid, I loved animals too. I would memorize every animal at the zoo. I knew where their exhibits were by heart. I didn't even need a map when we went to the zoo.
Sometimes all the signs are there.
Opportunity knocks in some serendipitous form and if you are listening, you will put two and two together with ease. But I was not listening that day in the board room. Rather than open myself to understanding the obvious brilliance of combining animals and yogurt, I was too focused on my own bowels.
I close the blinds and grab an Activia out of the refrigerator. I turn down the lights and eat it alone in the warm glow of daytime television.
I do not keep in touch with my former board members.
Sometimes, I think I'd like to take them on the Maury show.
Other times, I feel that I would love to have the presence of mind to be able to understand my role in my own downfall. The more Activia I eat, the healthier my colon becomes - the closer I get to accepting responsibility for my actions.
As I watch a teenage delinquent express her urgent desire to become a mother, I feel acutely aware that some degree of healing is always possible for all of us. I am suddenly overcome with desire to seek out a new path. I think of the calm young woman that day in the boardroom - defiant in her righteousness as I stumbled in error.
I feel the breeze on my cheek once more and it prepares me to move forward.
I return to my computer and logout of Facebook.
I am ready for the next step.
Submitted February 08, 2017 at 08:03AM by ovoKOS7 http://ift.tt/2kFKIR5 trees
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