“I shot an arrow into the air;
It fell to earth I know not where”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I, too, shot an arrow into the air. The act, in and of itself, was not the result of personal turmoil in a post Jungian urbanized milieu. It was a demonstration of self actualization from someone smothering in bureaucratic flotsam. I was intuiting and demonstrating the Zen belief of experiencing the moment in that moment. By this action, I engulfed myself in spirituality that extended beyond religion and its dogma.
Unfortunately, my exaltation at the secular poeticism of this act was tempered by the fact that the arrow came down and punctured a street vendor’s pretzel. A cop, who happened to be emerging from Wendy’s, immediately wrote out a ticket for endangering bystanders and confiscated the arrow. The vendor forced me to pay for the pretzel.
An investigator for The Food and Drug Administration, who happened to be buying a hot dog from said vendor, issued me a citation for tampering with public food.
A trainer came out of a nearby gym, ridiculing the unimpressive height of the arrow’s arc, and offered to increase my upper body strength for a fee. A choreographer, out walking his dog, critiqued my form as being too derivative. A single woman, seeking a man with a hunter’s instincts, slipped me her phone number. Some kid squirted me with a water pistol just because he could.
A PETA member riding past demanded to know if I had used artificial feathers on the tip or if innocent birds were killed.
A representative from the American Indian Anti-Defamation League saw the whole thing from his barber’s window; ran outside and promised to sue me for “derogatory and inappropriate usage of Indian weaponry.” A lawyer walking past offered his services, which I’m going to need because the vendor is claiming shock and emotional distress, and since he is the shop steward for the local vendor’s union, I can expect another lawsuit from them.
A woman putting quarters into a meter happened to be a psychiatrist and she slipped me her card, throwing in the card of her cousin who was a chiropractor. I had thrown out my shoulder firing the arrow. The meter maid placed an overtime parking ticket under my windshield wiper as I argued with at least five people over my action.
After returning my copy of The Collected Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to the library, I put away my bow and decided to take up darts. – Joe Del Priore