The Pothole

You don't even look anymore. Your hands just move the wheel a foot to the left at the exact spot on your street that pothole's lived since before your car had this many miles on it, a small automatic swerve you've made so many times it's basically muscle memory now. That's the Devil's real trick — not some dramatic temptation, just a familiar bad thing you've built your whole route around instead of ever pushing to have removed.

Something in your life has become exactly this: a known problem you navigate instead of confront, comfortable in its predictability even though it's still, technically, a hazard. Today's a decent day to ask whether the swerve has become easier than the fix, and whether that's actually still working for you.

It's been a lake since Carnival, deep enough somebody dropped a rubber duck in it as a joke, and now the city's painted a cartoon fish on the orange barrel next to it instead of actually filling the hole — humor standing in for a fix, again, the way it always does around here. There's a real danger in laughing at a problem so consistently that the laughing becomes the only response anyone ever mounts. The joke's funny. The hole's still there.

Something you've been making light of today might need more than a joke. Notice if humor has become your only coping mechanism for a problem that's actually gotten worse while you were laughing at it.