Avoid the Red Circle of Curiosity or Get Soap in Your Eye
I have a habit of checking the notifications on my various social media sites before I get up in the morning. I had one Pinterest notification this morning and opened the app thinking it would be a picture of a cute animal or the latest idea for inventive Christmas table decorations. Before I could open the notification, the Pinterest algorithm thought it would be nice to lay a trap for me on the front page. It was a black and white picture of a man, standing beside a chair. At his feet was a big, red circle. My better judgment said don’t click. The caption read, “People In The 1800’s Did This With Dead Bodies”. This man is alive, or so I thought, and there is definitely something on the floor behind his feet inside the red circle. I squint, but the thing on the floor is too small to identify, and so my journey through Victorian postmortem photography takes a morbid turn. The thing in the red circle was a contraption to hold the dead up in a posed position while the photographer snapped pics of them, usually with their eyes open, and sometimes with their live relatives standing around them.
I will admit I do like interesting cemetery monuments, and I do have Pinterest boards with photographs I took of said monuments, but what would make Pinterest think I would want to see the dead people who sleep beneath those monuments posed as if they were alive?
As a writer, I have a vivid imagination. The characters from my books are real and in living color in my mind. This morning, after taking the red-circle bait, I had morbid black and white characters in my mind, staring at me with lifeless, open eyes as I stepped into the shower. For sanity’s sake, sometimes you have to keep one eye open even though there may be the sting of soap in it. Take my advice and don’t get sucked into the red circle of curiosity—especially before a shower.
