STOP ACTING LIKE A HOOD ORNAMENT

Came out of the house in a rush this morning 'cause I was a bit late in my usual train-catching schedule, reached to put the key in the motorcycle and beheld, there where you'd put a hood ornament - if you were of such a mind and a motorcycle had a hood – there, facing forward with all the green hauteur you've ever seen, a proud bright-emerald frog, bulgy black eyes gazing ahead like the elegantly stylized hood ornament on a Rolls Royce Green Ghost, as though he were thinking: now this is speed, this is quality, this is where I belong-- but of course it wasn't a Rolls, as I've indicated, it was merely the humble motorcycle I use to freewheel down the mountain to the train in the morning and power back up at night, but frogs can get carried away.

Even though he was way too classy for the vehicle, I wanted to leave him there, posing like a green Mussolini with his proud amphibian heritage, but I couldn't see him holding office very long when I really got rolling; and waiting for that embodiment of pride to fly off like a spinning frog and get splatted flat on the road would not only be a shame in terms of froggy nobility and all that, it would distract me from the total focus that is essential for freewheeling fast down a one-lane, sharply and blindly curvy - and wet - mountain road with now and then delivery trucks and automotive residents speeding up it on hurries of their own.

So although I wouldn't have minded having a live emerald hood ornament, I had to get the supreme leader off there, and I was in a hurry as I say, so I poked him in the rear with the key. He jumped much as Mussolini would have jumped in response to such impropriety, but the crafty little green guy landed on the hub of the front wheel inside the spokes, begetting even more grotesque freewheeling images that posed even greater loss of face and whatnot for Il Duce.

So as the clock ticked I had to get down on my knees and poke around in there, trying to reach inside the spokes and prod the frog again with the key, backed by a series of not carefully chosen yet carefully enunciated words, but the key was too short, the words were too alien and the space was too tight, his greenness gazing at me in that bulgy way, as though thinking 'You're in a hurry, aren't you,' so I went and got a short piece of bamboo (a lot of that around) and poked and prodded him from spoke to spoke, he really didn't want to leave, finally winkling his brightness out of there and onto a nice bouncy plantain leaf where he belonged.

So then I had to avoid the plantain leaf when I was pulling out, and really hotwheel it down the mountain, speedsqueezing past an upcoming truck along the way. Anyhow I made the train, intact and by a whisker, so on the ride into the city to the office and another long day of desk work in exchange for pieces of colored paper with dead politicians' pictures on them I got to think about what a great life that frog must be having right now, up there where I say I live...