Yellow Socks

A Self-Help Paper

Suppose you are a lesser known species of pufferfish. Every morning you would rise, open your chest of drawers, and look wistfully at any pair of socks that happened to catch your eye, unable to wear them. You would then proceed in your quiet, unassuming life, puttering about amongst the seaweeds, sadly reflecting on mankind’s obliviousness. One day you may meet a seahorse, the other a carp, and yet another a twisty yellow-spotted green slime-eel. What a life to lead!

Unfortunately, this seems to be the state of most politicians, but that is another matter intirelee.

Now, one day you may take it into your head to conclude something. And after staring at your socks for the day (one with red stripes, one with pumice stripes) you begin to search around and about for a thing upon which you can conclude. You pass along a sunken ship, a manatee playing golf, and a pink flamingo, but upon none of these you feel the urge, nay, desire to conclude. Walking up onto the beach before remembering you are a lesser known species of pufferfish and promptly depositing yourself back into the water, you seat your scaly behind down on a rock and begin to think. Upon thinking for a good twenty seconds, you resolutely stand up again, giving up on the hopelessly boring exercise of thinking. Swishing softly amongst the slippery seaweed strands, you slowly sigh and serenely–suffocate in longing for a salty souffle–but I am getting ahead of myself. This is no time for poetry, however beautiful.

A single tear drips softly from your eye over the sheer melancholy of the situation, before you wipe it away with a gracious flipper.

Deciding that you are not one for social constructs, you stride up the beach again, until you meet a fisherman. You’ve never seen a man before! Sitting down with him on the dock you begin to chat with him, delving into life’s deepest matters. You’re earnest speaking, his quiet listening, your fishy gurgling, the wind rustling his leaves… You shift ever so slightly closer to him before standing up hurriedly and removing a splinter from your tail after some elegant hops and melodic shouts of agony, before realizing that you have accidentally knocked the man out of his pot and into the lake. As it appears he doesn’t know how to swim, you dive in after him, landing on his head with a rather nice sound before realizing he did not need to swim, as the lake is but two or perhaps three inches deep. Feeling hopelessly lost upon seeing this, you begin to cast about for your lake, as you wonder why on earth someone would make a dock purely for a puddle.

Thirty minutes later once you have got back up and taken your head out of your arms for the agony of losing your home, you realize that had you just waited for the tide to come back in, the rock pool would have been much deeper, and you would after all have ended up saving the man’s life with your frantic dive back in for him. Feeling validated from this, you smile.

Waving to the man hurriedly over your shoulder, you continue out to sea before it disappears again. Returning to your home, you decide that if you can flirt with a man that well, you can wear socks however you want. Placing a pair of yellow socks upon your dainty flippers, you sit down on a rock amongst the seaweeds and pink flamingos, deciding to think about something to contemplate tomorrow.

And with a final thought on a manatee’s sad life of attempting to hit a ball into a hole while underwater, and the sheer stupidity of such a thing, you fall asleep.