I may be out but I’m not down.

Fail Harder! What an illogical witticism. Everybody likes to say it, but no one wants to do it. I can weigh in here, seeing lately I have turned failure into a cottage industry. The old saying, “No balls, no blue chips” comes to mind. Besides finding a million ways not to do things, failure is a necessary evil. But if you can avoid it, by all means do.

A short memory is also helpful.

A year ago, I reached what I thought was my last stop on the Red Line of life. By anyone’s standard, including mine at the time. The gifts I have received from that fiasco are too numerous to mention at the moment but I’ll just leave it at my restored health. I didn’t know how sick and unhappy I was until the pain stopped.

Yes, I fell down but I got up just before the bell. As in Greek mythology, when  Antaeus was thrown to the ground, he grew stronger, as his Mother Earth restored and revitalized him. You can’t get up if you don’t fall down.

I am reminded of a joke I heard when I was a kid, (I think in jokes) about a horny rooster whose resilience is notable. A desperate farmer bought this so-called super rooster for an exorbitant amount of money. So desperate was he. When he brought the rooster home, the rooster screwed everything but the chickens. He did the dog, the cat, the sheep and the goats.

The impatient farmer gave the rooster one more chance to do what he bought him for before he dispatched him. On the day of reckoning, the farmer checked the chicken coop and found the rooster hadn’t been in there, so he gets his gun and goes looking for his bad investment. He looked everywhere to no avail.

Finally, he finds the rooster in a crumpled mess behind a freshly tampered-with bull. The clearly outmatched rooster lay there covered in blood with both his wings broken and his little neck screwed around in the noon day sun as vultures circled above.

The farmer says, “Well, it looks like you finally went too far, you little varmint, now the vultures are coming for you.” The rooster opens one eye and says, “Shhhh, they’re getting closer.”