I remember when a simple handshake meant something, and with that integrity you could go a long way. Those were the days when you had no reason to not trust someone’s word, plus you had no point of reference to call anything other than a spade a ‘spade.’ Yeah, those days bring back the nostalgia. The mere thought of my mom telling me to ‘not take candy from strangers’ seems so much more poignant now that I have taken bowls full from them. So cute, she would revise it with my age; ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it IS too good to be true.” I guess even with revisions, you still have to touch the fire to realize it burns. The analogies that we hear and repeat, revise and reintroduce, hold merely no meaning until it actually means a hell of a lot of something.

So we sit here and contemplate these meanings until our heads get so convoluted with what it all means. By now, we’re so utterly paranoid that we don’t know if it burns or not. Is it fire? Isn’t it fire? Wait, is it really fire? I can’t be sure. Repeat. After the ‘spade’ has become a ‘spade’ time after time we start to distinguish between a spade and a non-spade, until the spade takes on a different shape. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. So now that we’re dealing with ducks, we conveniently forget about the candy, fires, and spades. Now, we have to define ducks? Jesus, now everything means far too much and needs more clarification than simply not taking a piece of candy from someone you don’t know. Now, you actually have to trust yourself to decipher all these different literary devices of life into one system that holds your better interest. Sometimes, you don’t even have time to do the analysis that leads you to determine if it can walk or quack. Sometimes, you just have to know if it’s a duck.

Handshakes aren’t so simple anymore. In fact, handshakes mean contracts. Handshakes make people money and with money you need lawyers and partners to negotiate the touch of hand. Handshakes tell if you’re nervous, confident, or weak. Handshakes can lie and handshakes can cause paranoia. As I revert back to my duck-duck-goose days, I’m not going to just wait for goose; I’m going to just start giving high fives because no one gives high fives unless they’re genuinely excited about it.