CHILDRE!!

My car smells like death. I left my windows down in a rain storm last week and a little mold stain appeared on the floor of my passenger seat. And I noticed the stain and the smell right away but I let it hang around because the smell was tolerable and it looked like a cute little blob trying to raise its little blob hand.

I WUV YOU ANDY!

I loved you too, little mold-blob. But after about 4 days of sitting around in my hot car in the summer, I opened my door one morning to find that you'd taken on the smell of a rotting possum. And so, today you had to be killed with malicious disinfectant chemicals.

Maybe I'm not very socially well-adjusted but I keep trying to tie this little episode into the nature of friendships, hope, and dreams.

They both show up out of nowhere and strike you as appealing in some way but after a while they start endangering your health and interfering with your daily life. And if you're a scared and lazy person like me, your initial reaction is, "I'll just leave it alone and it'll probably go away."

But it won't! You have to actively and in a somewhat toxic manner, cleanse the region so thoroughly that it will never return again!

Relationships are like mold. And you gotta manage the mold in the passenger seat of your car. You can't just kill ALL the mold, otherwise your driving...on the road of life....alone! No, you need some mold to feel alive.

You gotta manage your mold.

I guess some people would call that, "Burning your bridges."

And while that's a less pessimistic analogy, I think it's also less accurate. Bridges have too much purpose and direction and structure. Molds are messy and accidental and have weird, mysterious functions and abilities. I'm definitely more of a mold than a bridge.

Moldy...mold...bridge..man.

DONE!