Super-Hero Contest Entries

About Running from Hell with El

© December 2, 2011 E. L. Farris. Welcome to my blog. I talk a lot. My essence is captured by the mythical Phoenix, who rose from the ashes and was reborn. I have walked a difficult path to get here, but with three children on my back, the future never has never looked brighter. Honestly, this isn't something I planned out or anything. I don't plan. I don't lay my clothes out for tomorrow or make meal menus a week in advance and calendars confuse the crap out of me. But I was thinking as I was running the other day about myself (and yeah, I think about myself way too much, I know it) and I got on the subject of heaven and hell and trouble; lots of trouble. Yup. That's me. I'm troubling; I find trouble; I make trouble; I get in trouble; I get troubled; I make everyone else troubled. I'm trouble. It’s my nature to find trouble, sort of as inevitably as a dog will seek out and devour the stalest, decaying mound of road kill within miles of its nose. One time my dog fought a raccoon off in order to consume an entire rotting turkey carcass that we’d tossed into the trash bin the night before, and forget to lock down I reckon (and if you’re wondering why we didn’t remove the entire rotting turkey carcass from either the raccoon or the family dog, well, that’s how rotten the turkey smelled, I mean, it was like a cataclysmic, apocalyptic reality of rot, I’m telling you). I sniff out trouble with the inevitability of a kid tossing a tantrum after too much birthday party. Even as an adult attending church (please don’t nag me about going more often—so many people have tried that and it just brings out my inner pouting recalcitrant teenager) I cannot contain snickering and inappropriate giggles (and this is at services where I’m crying in reverent gratitude ten seconds prior to the snarky snickering). If there is hell, and I think it is much safer to assume there is because (as I read in Dilbert’s column the other day) Satan has a delicious sense of irony, especially if ignored, then I’m always skating two or three steps ahead of landing there. It’s not that I don’t want to be good; I mean, my theme song would be that idiotic song from Dukes of Hazard (talk about unwanted ear worms)—you know, the “good ol’ boys don’t mean no harm” line, except when I grew up I realized there was a freakin’ Confederate flag drawn on top of their sick Dodge Challenger. And I detest and deplore everything that the Confederate flag represents, but my point is that I can’t help making trouble in my unending quest for a good time. And here is where the running falls into place. We sort of got the hell aspect of the name figured out right? I got this thing for trouble; thus, I am at high hell risk. What else do you need to know about me? Well, I run. I’ve been running since I turned 14 and lost a ton of weight that I’d put on to keep eyes from leering at me, or at least that’s my theory for why I got so fat as a twee...ner. A lot of abused girls put on weight as a protective instinct and it worked pretty well for a time, but carrying around extra weight is a burden that I didn’t like shouldering. So I went on one of those dam* diets and started to run and I’ve been running since. Whenever I stop running, and sometimes even when I’ve been running, I’ve landed in a lot of trouble. I smoked and drank and used all sorts of recreational and prescription assists if you get my drift; for a time, I purposely failed classes as a way of screaming “Fu** you” at the adults in my life who failed me in so many ways. And every time I landed a few inches short of hell’s gates, or even in jail, I ran my way back out of there. I ran through a childhood that could well be described as hell. I ran through major depressive episodes and often teetered one step from the edge of a breakdown, but through running, held onto my sanity, my life and whatever belief in God I’ve managed to cobble together one trudging slow step after the other. Each step I take, no matter how physically painful, draws me a shade closer into my better angels. And painful the steps have become over the years, which is how I earned the nickname Phoenix. Some mornings I feel like I got run over by a bus and yet the truth is, I was. My family and I survived a collision with a metro bus, and I can’t talk about it much because we’re involved in litigation, but it’s fair to say that the accident fuc*ed me up pretty badly. And yet I keep rising, like a reborn Phoenix, from the pyre of a burning fire, and as I run I realize that whatever hell is or isn’t, as long as I keep rising, my spirit will never die. Meanwhile, I’m not taking any chances. I read enough about hell in Milton and Dante to know I don’t want to fall into it. I don’t even want to visit hell (and you couldn’t pay me to reread Milton again, whoa, talk about a rough read) unless of course Beatrice comes with me.