Built Different
inquiry
Do you ever think about what if you did things different?
Like what if I hadn’t ever met my wife?
I would be lost and alone.
What if I’d never learned to play guitar?
It’s undeniable that I would have ended up alone. Because a measure of musical ability would be the only thing that could cause a woman to ignore (or at least minimize) the problem of my torso to leg ratio.
Where T stands for Torso length and L for Leg length:
T/L = 1.5/1.
It’s extreme.
[This may not be a helpful guidepost, but if you’re aware of dwarfish fin de siecle Parisian artist Toulouse-Lautrec, I’m built along similar lines, albeit more heavily torsoed.]
What if I never stepped in that bucket?
It goes without saying that this is less of a problem for folks with more traditional T/L proportions. I’m encumbered by stepping in a bucket in ways that would baffle most fit members of modern society. They can’t imagine the outsized effect the mundane act of dropping one’s guard for a moment and then stepping into a bucket has for my physiognomy.
What if my wife had been more malnourished as a child and hadn’t grown quite so tall?
Then she couldn’t put the remote for the playstation up on the high shelf, out of my reach. And then I’d be able to watch whatever I wanted, even if it does give me nightmares.
And what if I had stepped in that bucket, but had refused help from the raccoons?
Because then, I wouldn’t have had to agree to their terms. Just imagine a life where I didn’t agree to the raccoons’ terms, and I could live without that burden.
I’m part of a small but growing segment of our society that chafes under the manacles of a powerful and nocturnal cabal of hand-washing mammals. I’ve written at length about this elsewhere, so I won’t burden the reader at present.
***
Every human life contains both ill and fair fortune, and I have much for which I ought to be thankful. But for some of us (where IF stands for Ill-Fortune and FF stands for Fair Fortune) the balances seem to sometimes tip into drastic inequilibria (IF/FF may seem to approach 1.5/1 or even greater disparities).
At times I am forced to consider the ways in which the pattern of certain physical flaws works its way into the machinery of fate, and makes our wills un-free. Is there a torso-to-leg determinism? Does, perhaps, this ratio manifest in our stars, in being itself? I wonder.