Happy For No Damn Reason

From an early age a whisper in my ear guided me on a path of personal healing and ever greater access to, and understanding of things spiritual. And then the spiders showed up.

The first one bit my dick—yeah, literally! I regularly attended a men's group at the time, and after sharing this bit of embarrassment, the leader opened a book to a page about spiders, and we all learned that according to the lore of the book, the little creeps are the weavers of language. We extrapolated from the fact that it sunk its teeth into my “staff of creation”, the mouthy arachnid was trying to tell me to follow my passion for writing, which is comical because I left a trail of low C, and D grades through Jr. High and High School English —a subject I much hated. Or, more properly I hated the mechanics—I could never quite get the hang of participles, predicates or infinitives, but I loved the occasional samplings of literature and poetry.

So, I joined a writer's club, and after a few meetings, agreed to participate in a fundraiser. I collected pledges of a dollar, or two per page, to be written on a topic unknown until the day of the event. When the morning of the event arrived, I began the short journey to my car. On the way, I nearly walked into a cartwheel web taller than I. At the event, a spider scurried across my laptop bag as I tugged on the bag's zipper. After the event and five pages completed, I mounted the seat in my car, and as I turned the key in the ignition, a baby spider rappelled down from the ceiling to land on the steering wheel in front of me. At a gas station, upon removing the filler cap, I discovered an entire community of small spiders squatting in its nether recesses around the gas intake port. None of this was common in my life, before, or after! Especially that gas intake port —I checked it for many days following—nary a spider!

And they kept showing up in other places—across the desk where I write, on my computer screen, from the ceiling on a glossy tether, all prodding me to write. But, especially, it seemed, to write Happy For No Damn Reason—the culmination of a life-long spiritual quest—essentially, my life's work! You can download it for FREEish here on my website: www.HFNDR.com. BTW: "FREEish" because I ask for a Buck "if it doesn’t suck”.