I was inspired by thisismylife's recent blogging challenge on @liketu, 'The 30 Pictures 30 Stories Challenge'.
Which was originally inspired by rubencress '30 day not-so ordinary ordinary items challenge'.
Both are great challenges to encourage daily posting on hive.
This challenge is pretty open-ended; please feel free to follow my formula, or thisismylife's or rubencress' challenge structures listed in their posts linked above 🔼
The only stipulations are that you post one picture daily with a personal story for 30 days.
Write your story/anecdote to the best of your ability, and use the tag #30stories and/or the #notsoordinary tag if you're following rubencress' challenge. It is also advised to use the #challenge tag.
As I am a professional writer outside of hive blockchain and only dabble as an amateur photographer, I thought I'd follow thisismylife's challenge format to tell some stories and anecdotes about my strange life.
It was Halloween 2022, and a friend of mine had just died.
A regular at the pub I used to work at who I had many heated debates with, mainly because I wasn't drunk as the bar staff, and he was... but no matter. He was a nice man, and it was very upsetting to hear that he'd just dropped out a few days earlier from a brain embolism.
Life can be this way sometimes, and the older you get the more you realise that the idea that things should/could or are fair become more and more ludicrous.
Life is just a sequence of events that we delude ourselves we have control over, and while in some cases we do have a measure of control, in no case do we have complete control.
This is a fantasy, a lie we tell ourselves to be able to live in a universe of chaotic coincidence and odd past/future patterns/echoes that seem to paint a picture of some type of pre-ordained plan.
But as my Barfly friend was one for a good old joke, his brother and I laughed as I helped him carry the buffet into Ted's favourite pub as it was Halloween we were half expecting him to pop the lid up, leap out of the coffin and do a little dance.
Sadly, this was not to happen, and it is a shame as his coffin was rolled into the crematorium chamber to 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life'. So an impromptu Halloween jape would have been particularly apt.
In the end what happened was that we all returned to the pub I worked at for years, Ye Cracke drank one too many pints of Carlsberg (his favourite pint) and eventually, someone convinced me in my inebriated state to let them take this photo next to my Halloween bride.
It is fair to say my girlfriend found the whole thing hilarious and urged me to finally pop the question 😂
Thanks for reading 🌿
All photos and media design used in this post are my own.
Camera: Samsung S7 Smart Phone.
To check out my poetry performed to music please visit my YouTube channel Mainly Poetry.