FGO's

I'm in the middle of another FGO - friggin' growth opportunity - the kind of screw-up that makes you imagine that  Kettle Salt and Pepper Chips are medicine, and the whole bag is prescribed.  And multiple dark chocolates filled with caramel, maybe even with a little salt on top of those as well. . .

What couldn't possibly help is keeping up with my exercise routine, or making sure I take those vitamins while I worry about this, or going to bed early, or watching a funny movie, or drinking lots of water or taking a nap.  Surely none of those things would help. . .

In the Really Fortunate Department, I have some honest friends, the kind you call when you need to hear the Bare Bottomed Truth, the kind of truth that makes you want to la la la la la la la put your fingers in your ears. And they are the best kind, these friends, the kind that, even if you have been here before, in this particular nasty corner with all the same grunge, and the darkness and that smell (you know the one- don't pretend you don't), they gently point out your return visit with a bit of elegance, a bit of compassion.  Because maybe they have been there too, in their version of this corner, or maybe their nasty corner is decorated slightly differently, but they recognize the smell.

I can get so lonely in an FGO, primarily because in the midst of one, my focus gets pretty narrowed down, and if I don't watch it, and call one of these friends, that focus brings in The Jury.  My jury is composed of puckery-faced ugly people (P-FUG's) with superb memories.  They remember every transgression of my long, long life.  If questioned carefully, I'll bet their lists would go back before my birth, the vindictive ways I kicked my poor mother.  And some of them believe in past lives.  So you can imagine.

These friends, not the P-FUG's but the dear long-suffering people I call are focused on something else, which is beyond my view from Cage FGO.  They remember, these sainted ones, that maybe I haven't spent my whole life doing things that, as Anne Lamott would say, would make Jesus want to drink straight gin out of the cat dish.  That there was that time when I shared my crackers in second grade.  And that maybe I am being ever so slightly overdramatic.  Maybe this FGO isn't quite as big to anybody else as it appears to me, that in fact, if I didn't keep calling them to talk about it, they wouldn't think about it -  at all -  or even know about it - at all.

Well, that seems impossible.  But because I love them, and they love me, warts and all, I'm going with their assessment.  I'm going to have some more potato chips and then take a nap. . .