The Pterodactyl on the Covered Bridge

It's hard for Candy to remain her bitter self and to keep her heart as crusty and hard as a four-day-old baguette when happiness keeps swooping in.

My brain is like one of those things they used to have behind the front desk at hotels, with little pigeonholes for room keys and phone messages. Every room had its own compartment. Every key had a place to go. In the Brain of Candy Rant, there have always been many, many pigeonholes for each of the following categories: Things to Dread, Bad Memories, Things That Suck, Things That Might Get Messed Up, Reasons Candy Might Go to Hell, and the like.

When something good happened to me, the key that went with that particular thing got lost on the floor behind the counter, because there was no place to put it. When I tried to push it into one of the dark and dreadful pigeonholes, it was rejected. Spat out. Like those maddening change machines that seem to think your dollar is not quite up to snuff.

In the past year, good things keep happening to poor Candy, who is too mentally warped to know what to do with them. Good things cause discomfort. Case in point: when a nice work promotion came along a few years back, out of the blue, I was in Immediate Cognitive Distress. Ten minutes later, I walked to my car and someone had bashed the side of it in. Hit and run crunch. I felt so much better. The other shoe had dropped almost instantaneously. Ahhh, sweet relief.

But now, something big has happened. Remember the Best Boyfriend in the World? The one who's been so mesmerizingly good to me? Well, a week ago today he became the Best Fiance in the World.

He proposed to me on a covered bridge in Indiana, close to where my family lives, and when he did, Happiness swooped down and sat atop that 100 year old bridge like a pterodactyl. Screaming like a banshee, just like at the beginning of "Jonny Quest." (And if you got that reference, I love you.) It flapped its prehistoric wings and did a little Jurassic dance and there I was, on the bridge, crying like a wussie-girl as the shiny rock was sliding onto my finger.

There is no getting around this. I have to tear down some old things and build something new. I have to demolish the giant steely 90-storey hotel and its hundreds of "the shit is gonna hit the fan" pigeonholes, and start up again with a tiny bed and breakfast where there is only one room. Then I don't have to pigeonhole everything into Good or Bad. I can just go into the teeny tiny hidden house in the woods and try to get used to the idea that life doesn't have to be polarized. You can have joy and fear and confusion all at once.

OK, I'm making myself puke. I need to break some glass.

I wouldn't have to ponder all this if Happiness hadn't made me her bitch.