I opened up a carton of grapes to find this little label on the underside of the lid:
But shouldn’t *I* be the one to decide that, carton of grapes? Isn’t it up to ME what flavor these bulbous purple orbs hold?
Am I not master of my own taste buds? Do I not bite into the grape myself and feel it burst like a cow’s eyeball betwixt my molars?
YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO THINK!
(Upon further review, the grapes were actually very tasty. Possibly even delightful-adjacent. I’ll point out, though, for the benefit of the copywriters for these particular grapes, that I don’t know what “fresh” tastes like [and neither, I suspect, do they], nor do I know what a “satisfying flavor” is [and neither, I suspect, do they].)
In fact, since noticing this odd little blurb inside the carton of grapes, I’ve noticed that tons and tons — maybe even most — ad copy is like this. It tells you — brashly, confidently, even arrogantly — what your experience of the product will be. But aren’t these things subjective? Doesn’t every single thing we experience get filtered through our own rose- or mauve- or barf-colored sunglasses? I can’t know, under any current technological parameters, what your experience is when you bite into a juicy, ripe grape. Hell, I can’t even be sure that the color you see is the same purple that I see. Your rods and cones might be all inverted and misshapen, and you actually see a blue, yellow, or (I shudder to think) brown grape. Or maybe it’s MY rods and cones that are all upsey-downsey. All I can do is assume that your experience is pretty darn close to mine and agree that we’ll use the same word to describe it, and go through our lives hoping for the best.
But I can’t know what it’s like to be inside your head.
And these grapes, unless they’ve made some truly staggering leaps in sentience, damn sure can’t know what it’s like to be in mine.
Truth be told, I can’t even be sure that you have any experience at all. I can’t even be sure that you’re not a robot. I can’t even be really and truly sure that I’m not a robot.
But let’s not go getting too existential. They’re only grapes after all. (And maybe I took my recent re-viewing of WestWorld too much to heart.)
*eyes the carton of grapes suspiciously*
*chomps one*
*tentatively considers grape sentience, and by extension, grape genocide*
*decides it’s worth it and eats most of the carton*
This sounds really sad and horrific until the punchline comes: they’re fine, but since they’re cold-blooded, their bodies have literally just shut down until the weather warms up again. At which point they’ll thaw out and fargo off back into their trees to munch on flies and look in two different directions at the same time.
Seriously. It gets too cold, so they just give up on life for a while. They don’t even do it deliberately, they just reach a point and shut down, like a Roomba running out of battery and parking itself in the middle of your foyer.
Once you learn that, it just becomes hilarious.
It would actually be a heck of a coping mechanism, wouldn’t it?
Stressed out at work? Significant other giving you a hard time? Too many bills coming in the mail? Ker-plunk. Down you go, and people just sort of step around you in your driveway until next season, when you come to.
“What’s that? Reviews are next Tuesday? HRRRGGHHHH — My heart!
Meanwhile, y’know, over in Australia, apparently the highways are melting, and I dunno how the iguanas deal with that.
Cold here.
So very, very cold.
Cold that strikes at your bones.
Cold that makes you forget warmth even exists.
Cold that defies metaphor and comparison and leaves only itself.
Cold cold cold cold cold.
I can’t lie — as a Georgia native, I prefer the extreme cold to the extreme heat. Atlanta thinks nothing of serving up weeks or even months at a time with highs in the 90s, where you can sweat from the simple act of opening your eyes in the morning. I should be desensitized to that by now, but I’m not, and by the looks of things, being 37 already, I’m not going to get any less sensitive to it from here on in.
So when I welcome winter every year, it’s genuine. I love Winter.
Of course, I love the typical Atlanta version of it, which is to say the temperature will dip below freezing maybe three or four times, and if you’re really really lucky, you’ll get a dusting of snow on one of those days, and bang-o, we’re out of school for a day or two while the Only Snow Plow in Atlanta makes its rounds. Needless to say, we’re not prepared for the arctic cone of destruction that’s engulfed the city for the past several days, and that threatens the next several more. They’re calling it a “winter bomb cyclone.” Seriously!
In our previous house, we had cold temps burst the pipes on at least two occasions and had scares on a couple more. Every time the mercury drops, I get antsy. Every faucet in our current house is left to drip overnight. Then the exterior lines froze, so I got out there in the 25-degree light of day (help!) with my wife’s hair dryer to coax a feeble stream of frigid water out of them and get them dripping again before scurrying back inside to huddle under a dozen comforters.
My dad sent over these weird-looking insulators — kinda looks like a jockstrap without the strap, or an oversized cyborg earmuff — to cover those faucets. “Don’t even need to drip ‘em with these things!”
But I trust no gadget to save me. In my nightmares, I hear the Chooom-HSSSSSSSSSSSSS of a ruptured water line spilling its guts into the walls. Even in the summertime. At this rate those things may keep dripping until march, faucet-jockstraps and all.
The cold also poses unique challenges for the runner. Summer is easy — wear the least amount of clothing that you can stand or that’s legal (whichever comes first) and go sweat until you dry out regardless. Winter? The trick is layers, but it can be overdone. Too little, and your tauntauns will freeze before you reach the first marker. Too much, and you sweat, and start shedding layers, and then your tauntauns freeze before you reach the second marker. Wind chill must be calculated. Amount of sunlight has to be considered. You could have degrees in maths (okay I’m not British but I love how they say “maths” when they mean “math”) and meteorology and still end up with frozen tauntauns on a quick 3-miler.
At least partially as a joke, I don’t doubt, my wife got me a full-fledged balaclava. A balaclava, for the uninitiated, has surprisingly little to do with puff pastry and a lot more to do with looking like a serious fargoing ninja. Except that the one she got me is bright red. Which makes me less “ninja” and more “what the hell is that lunatic running in sub-freezing temperatures wearing on his head — he’ll scare the deer”. I haven’t reached for it yet, but if the current “winter bomb cyclone” (I still can’t believe that’s really what they’re calling it!) persists, it won’t be long.
We’re back to work today, and not a day too soon, because if we had to keep those two — I’ll censor what I was about to call them — adorable little angels inside our house for one more day? (It’s too cold out there, play inside, I don’t know why it’s so cold just play, why are you hitting each other, put the cat down, kitchen tools are not toys, PLEASE STOP CRYING [that last is for my wife after many hours of the former].)
I might have donned my balaclava and my cyborg earmuffs and headed out for the third marker. And then later, been found like this:
Guest post today, which means — rarity of rarities! — we actually have Metaphor Monday on Monday!
Make sure you double back to Glenavailable’s Scenic Writer’s Shack once you’re done here.
Jellyfish evaporate in the sun.
So do ideas if you don’t write them down.
That’s why for a large number of years I’ve kept a series of what I ambitiously refer to as ‘writer’s notebooks’ Those saddle-stitch bound, dog-eared ones from three decades past are long gone now of course, but I still have in my possession two dating back to the early 2000’s. Both spiral-bound, one sporting a bubblegum pink cover the other aqua-marine, together they’re overflowing with what might best be labelled ‘fragments’.
These fragments include overheard snippets of dialogue from real life, television and movies, lists of unusual people and place names, beginnings or middles of ideas for stories, life quotes, mixed metaphors, creative insults, lifted descriptive passages from news articles and novels, jokes, self-deprecating remarks, even a couple of useful phrases to pull off a 1980’s era Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation (” I got my uzi-nine millimetre!”). And all of it written in a penmanship so poor much of it is bordering on illegible.
I was leafing thru ‘aquamarine’ just the other day.
In it I found the aforementioned assorted bric-a-brac wordery, including obituary type notes for the late English actor Dudley Moore (1935 – 2002). My scribble included the date he passed away (which, checking now, I realize I had gotten wrong), the fact he was only five feet two inches tall and the description of him as a sex ‘thimble’. Clearly at the time I regarded this quip as worthy of recording but up until this moment I’ve never found the opportunity to repeat it.
On other occasions however I’ve had cause to be thankful only a relatively short time down the track from the original transcribing that I made the effort to jot down, often in the dark while watching a television screen, of some overheard one-of-a-kind wisecrack or pearly good utterance.
The 29 acre island of Little Ross (complete with lighthouse) located off the southern coast of Scotland.
One relatively recent example of this occurred while viewing the despair-ridden and blood-splattered nightly bulletin known as the six ‘o clock news. On came one of those lighter human interest stories they insert to dilute the ‘stiff whiskey’ of the other stuff. Mention was made of a remote island lighthouse near Scotland called Little Ross that was up for sale. Highlighted was the tragic backstory of the lighthouse which included the murder of a previous lighthouse keeper back in 1960.
A summary of this news snippet made it into my most prized black-speckled notebook. This in turn launched an on-a-whim research splurge conducted on-line and amongst the shelves of my local library which culminated in the writing of a short story about two lighthouse keepers who drive each other to distraction due to the late-evening piano playing habits of one of them. And in direct homage to the bits ‘n pieces power of the writer’s notebook, this story then went on to appear in a November issue of the digital literary magazine RUMBLEFISH PRESS.
I have another notebook (apricot orange with horizontal white stripes and multicoloured section dividers) I use to record names. Unusual names. Names of distinction. Class names. So when Sloane Stephens mercilessly crushed Madison Keys in the U.S Open Women’s tennis final back in September… notebook time!
Only last night I was looking at a documentary on the making of 1949 British film noir THE THIRD MAN. In it they mentioned the sewer police featured in the chase scenes filmed amidst Vienna’s underground canal system were not hired actors but real-life lawmen whose ‘beat’ was the subterranean depths of the below-the-city waterways. The words ‘sewer police’ struck me as unusual enough to warrant recording, so once again … notebook time! (The black speckled one).
Might ‘sewer police’ make it into a piece of writing I embark upon in the near or distant future? Who knows? And that’s part of the mystery and charm of writer’s notebooks. You can never be certain if there’ll be any future use for the snippet you’ve thought worth preserving. But similar to playing the stock market, naturally you live in hope your investment will pay a nice dividend somewhere down the track.
Writer’s notebooks that are intended on capturing and recording random ear and mind candy comprising everything from flavoured phrases and witticisms to funny, touching and dramatic dialogue and quotable quotes (“Cometh the hour, cometh the man” came from a viewing of the 2016 Catherine Zeta Jones-starring DAD’S ARMY last week and it’s extremely tempting to remark that line was one of the few highlights of the entire movie) are at the very least a way of clocking in. They’re also a way of furthering one’s lifelong love affair with words and can always be surfed later for inspiration.
We were away from the homestead for a few days on a much-needed vacation. Missed a metaphor Monday and a couple of other posts I might have made in the meantime. So instead of a deep-dive on a topic, here’s a rapid-fire scatter-shot swipe at a few things I think I’m thinking about the week.
The Orange One continues to have his own personal version of the Midas Touch, which is the same as the fabled king who turned everything he touched into gold, except in the case of the DT, he turns everything he touches to poop. This week he’s poopifying the NFL, getting his poopy little fingers into all its nooks and crannies and ensuring that we can’t even watch a brainless game for a few hours on Sunday without having conversation hijacked and steered into the mountainside that is the poop-in-chief. I’ll leave it to you to figure out that while DT claims he’s having a hissy fit about the flag and by extension the military, it’s interesting that he’s doing so by disparaging a league wherein something like 3/4 of the players are black. Let’s not forget that the taking-a-knee thing started out because of race issues and had to do with visibility, not the flag or the military. You might argue that the national anthem isn’t the place for such protests, and maybe it isn’t, but the point of protest isn’t to make things as comfortable and unobtrusive for bystanders as possible, now, is it? Oh, there was also that kerfuffle with the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry. (Also mostly black.)
Whatever, the Daily Show and Samantha Bee and other venues have handled this better than I can; if you haven’t watched their clips, you should.
And while I’m on the subject of the DT (sorry, it’s been a while and he’s on a roll — a sharknado-rolls-downhill kind of roll), he’s intimating that our aid efforts to Puerto Rico are in some way concerned with the island’s debt. Never mind that Puerto Ricans are citizens, so it’s kind of like a few major cities are crippled, starving, and barely in communication. They’re people. And he’s worried about their debt in the same breath as talking about their literal survival. If you’re not enraged, you’re not paying attention.
In other eff-you-I’ve-got-mine news, I was sitting beachside with my kids, watching them do their best sandpiper imitations — chasing the waves and foam around, cackling and basically being adorable — and a pair of old ladies comes strolling up the beach. One of them slows down as she nears us. This isn’t totally unusual — grandparents tend to love watching little kids play, and as far as little kids go, mine are particularly adorable — but I glance at her and notice not the usual smile of watching the younger generation at play, but the sneer of the put-upon. Turns out, we were right in her walk path, which I guess I should have known, given that there was only an entire beach around us in literally half of all the available directions. She huffs a little and detours around us as closely as possible, even going so far as to step on my little finger as she resumes her path.
I feel like this may have been her little way of making the beaches great again, but I can’t be totally sure of her political leanings after such a tiny interaction.
While walking to a restaurant to pick up dinner one night, I saw a group of kids (and man, that sentiment crossing my fingers onto the page made me take a good, hard look at myself, because they were certainly college-aged) sitting at a sidewalk table in front of an ice cream shop. Six or seven of them, clearly all there together. In total silence. Not a word being said. Their attention, instead, entirely engrossed in their cell phones. I stopped. I stared. They didn’t notice me. (I’d have taken a picture, but I left my phone charging in the hotel room — it was dead from playing video games while my kids splashed in the pool all afternoon.) I continued to stare, and they continued not to notice, until a full thirty seconds had passed and I became uncomfortable.
I know, I know. It’s nothing new, these youths and their cell phones. But it shook me. I mean, Panama City Beach (aka the Redneck Riviera) is a haven for college kids having a good time, and here they sat, passively shoveling ice cream into their beaks, staring blankly at their little hypno-boxes. Creepy.
Vacation is great, but it’s terrible for eating. I figure my diet was roughly 60% grease-based, 35% straight-up fried, and maybe 5% green — and that green was only in the form of guacamole smeared on something else deep-fried. I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to see my own kitchen and my cast-iron murder skillet (come on, that thing is a home-defense system as much as it’s a dream for searing a steak).
And on the six-hour drive back from the beach, I was amused to be barraged with example after example that my theory about the rampant-yet-undiagnosed road disorder, PBV syndrome, is a real thing. Give me a minivan doing 75, and I’ll show you a beat-up old chevy that was doing 65 a minute ago now driving 80. Maybe I’ll mock-up a pamphlet and plant a few of them in doctors’ offices around town.
That feels like a heck of a lot of negativity. Here to right that ship is the sunset from our last night. I’m pretty sure there are at least a hundred shades of crimson in the sky, and I’m almost certain that the blue of the ocean here is described as “cobalt conundrum.”
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Accidentally Inspired 