Authors use chaos casually. Need a plot detour? Throw in an earthquake for your protagonist to cope with. It’s not a detour down the primrose path, a convenient alley or laneway. It’s a major detour on the highway to hell.
Real life is different. Real people have to deal with events for which they are, by and large, unprepared. Real consequences are incurred. This ain’t no fairy tale.
I put chaos into two handy categories. For convenience, let’s call them Whoops, and BOOM! Whoops is when something happens that’s a little or no so little deviation from the usual. It’s inconvenient, but not life-threatening. It’s serious, but not 911 sort of serious. The signature on a check is not legible, and it takes a day to get the darned thing cashed. You may even wind up learning from it- let’s get modern and go digital and online! You could wind up making beneficial changes in your life. You cope, innovate, make arrangements, and you may even learn from it. BOOM is different. It’s life-arresting, crushing, and maybe life-threatening. Need I say more?
Of course, I’ve oversimplified things. Whoops can grade into BOOM, mutate, reconfigure, or do dances with your life. I’ve had a share of both. One of the first little sayings that I learned to aid in the prevention of BOOM situations was: Prior Proper Preparations Prevent Piss Poor Performance. Following this little ditty, referred to as the seven P’s, truly helps. However, if the world truly wants to pick you up by the scruff of the neck, nothing much is going to help – sorry.
Now, people enter into this. When I was a Pius Itinerant moving every which way, I was very poor. Even Whoops situations can be serious when your resources are thin. But then there were some people I knew who, for lack of a better word, wanted to court chaos. They viewed a BOOM situation as a sort of cathartic event. They thought it was exhilarating. Of course, they had resources I lacked. And unfortunately, they used those resources poorly. More than a few wound up in Emergency Rooms after bad OD’s, car crashes, and in one case, a fall from a three-story building while dancing on a plank stretched between two buildings; he survived. They called it Dancing with the Devil.
Watching taught me my next major little saying, Don’t Dance With The Devil!!!
That’s all, and as the man said – behave!
Discover more from Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Whoops and Boom. I love a cut-to-the-chase description. This is perfect, Lou.
Thanks, Lois.
I saw that prompt yesterday and my first reaction was “Chaos? I’ll give you chaos!” then I thought of one of the times I was at Disneyland with my stepson. Next to Disneyland was a Chinese restaurant with a big sign. The sign said “Chaos” — the family’s name. Suddenly Ben cracked up. I looked where he was pointing and thought — but didn’t say — “nice of them to warn us.”
I’d see Disneyland as a sort of chaos. But yeah, visiting a restaurant named Chaos would have certainly appealed to me at a certain stage in my life! Was the food good?
We didn’t eat there. I wanted to. I figured it would be good Chinese food — LA? Prime location? Hungry? That was a great Disneyland trip. It was December and Ben and I got to ride Space Mountain five times in a row (we didn’t even have to get off) because almost no one was there.