Sometimes The Easy Ones Just Come to You

The other day, a friend of mine called me the "Queen of the Metaphor."  What can I say? I love a good metaphor. When you want to say something without actually saying it, well, you can always say something else to say it.  You could call it doublespeak.  You could call it being a Libra.

Sometimes you search and search and search for the right metaphor. You go digging deep. You start writing something. You trash it. Oh, wait! Let me try this! Nope, this won't work either. Crap.

Then, some days, like today maybe, you will be sitting at daybreak, having your first cup of coffee, casually perusing a news site that you haven't visited in a while, and the metaphor will find you. Actually, the metaphor doesn't just find you, it stands next to you and pounds you on the head with a Lodge 10-inch cast iron skillet until you're dead on the floor.

*****

Way back in the 1990's, after "Into Thin Air," was published, I got very interested in reading mountaineering books. I've always loved adventure and danger stories, especially the true kind (I remember re-reading again and again my father's copy of "On the Bottom," by Edward Ellsberg when I was a kid), so ITA sort of re-awakened that love in me.  I started devouring mountaineering stories because these guys just seemed so cool. (I was also on the verge of bolting New York to Colorado, so maybe it was some kind of premonition. Who knows.)  The top shelf of my bookshelf has books by Conrad Anker, Anatoli Boukreev, and the super-hot David Brashears.  Conrad Anker movingly tells the story of finding, after nearly a century, the body of George Mallory, he of "Because it is there," fame (NO! IT WAS NOT SIR EDMUND HILLARY), and burying it under a cairn and never telling anyone where it is. (The incredibly sad photos of Mallory's body still haunt me.)  And of course, Ed Viesturs. In any mountaineering story, Ed Viesturs turns up.  He's a mountaineering legend, fachrissakes.

*****

So here comes my metaphor.  It's sneaking up on me with that skillet in its hand, as I sit down with my Bustelo, a cigarette, and my Blackberry.

Ahh, good old slate.com. I loves me some slate.com.  And ooh, look, here's an interview with Ed Viesturs!

I was going to excerpt portions of this interview to demonstrate how parts of this article basically describe -- to a fucking mechanically-drawn T -- what happened to me and Mr. MWBMH (tm), but then I realized I would end up just cutting and pasting the whole damn thing. Every fucking word of this interview could describe my life in the past two and a half months!

So yes, even though the metaphor smacked me over the head with that Lodge skillet, making a beautiful hollow "CLONG" sound, and raising a hell of a monkey bump on my skull, I am still laughing about this.