This morning I finally rallied to get out the door for my run… and just as I did, the rain started to fall.
It was only a slight drizzle and it didn’t last long, but of course it would happen just as I set out on the streets to clock some garbage miles. I say garbage miles because I wasn’t able to go very fast — mindful of the sidewalks here that months ago when damp caused me to slip and fall on my bum and do some serious damage to my coccyx, a pain in my butt that to this day still more often than not causes me to wince as I run.
I found myself wondering about having my own little rain cloud that seems to follow me these days. There’s an old prozac advert or some other mood altering medication that promised a pill that could turn rain clouds into sunshine. And while I pondered that as raindrops kept falling on my head… and in my path along the toe-catching, tree root displaced sidewalks… I was trying to think of a cartoon character that has a cloud following him. Pig Pen is a Peanuts denizen so filthy that there’s always a cloud of dirt encircling him. That wasn’t who I was after.
Eeyore is one negative donkey and while perhaps too close to me in outlook of late, he doesn’t necessarily have his own dark cloud following him all the time… just MOST of the time.
Below: Cloud vs No Cloud Eeyore.
And yet when I googled “cartoon character with cloud overhead” the results were a pop cultural icon of yore that if I’m being honest with myself is most assuredly NOT who I was thinking of. The reason being that I’m not sure I’ve ever even HEARD of Joe Btfsplk. Sure, I’ve HEARD of Li’l Abner but I don’t really KNOW Li’l Abner and friends. That’s the thing about pop culture — or culture — or life in general. You can know things and know references or derivations of same without ever really knowing the original.
But I do know that at the moment I guess I would claim Joe Btfskplk as my spirit animal… or to put it another way, he would be my Harry Potter-ian Patronus (why aren’t they Matronus? Why must everything BE so patriarchial?!).
The sun was coming out though as I ever-so-slowly returned to my front door finishing my “run,” a word deserving of quotes implying an irony.
The dark rain cloud however remained hovering over me.