Some days I feel like the greyhound that caught the artificial rabbit. Or should that be the cheetah that caught the mechanical bull? Last week I had one of those days and nobody noticed, which allowed me to slink back into the doghouse where I usually find myself in relation to the vast majority of my species, perhaps not inappropriately. No one seemed to notice because obviously I didn’t make the appropriate noises to attract attention.
Other days like today, a day that will live in infamy, I feel like that guy pulling the cord to start the lawnmower that won’t start unless the Fonz snaps his fingers. How many ways can one date oneself and not end up going home alone in the end?
So, what’s this metaphor all about anyway, and why should anyone follow it? Is it too mechanical and rusty? Everyone is still mad about Shakespeare, after all, but who gives proper credit to Sir Phillip Sidney?
Literacy is a funny thing with the right witty operator, for your information, in case you didn’t know it. Hold please. You’ve likely heard that line in one form or another before. The reverse is also true if you say it enough times over and over. Please hold that thought.
Alexander the Great was reportedly a drunk but no one around him had the guts to whine about it, at least not that we know of. No one wrote it down. I could be wrong. I have not finished reading the napkin notes left by his companions yet. Of course in our terms he was a functional alcoholic, even if his functioning could be considered dysfunctional in our times.
Now, let’s consider all the talk in earlier times contemporaneous with Shakespeare, Alexander the Great (and wasn’t he tutored by someone famous, too?), to say nothing of time before those times, all that time when people were jabbering away with each other, drunk and sober.
It stands to reason a lot of witty things got said in original ways on odd and even days, and no one wrote it down because, well, there may not have been writing then or certainly not in the way there is now.
It is a bit sad to think that really the wittiest folks at the time were the ones who wrote with such lack of facility the books of Ye Olde Testament whose phrases often fail to turn like a well-used ale tankard.
By the time we get to anyone who can make the words sing off the page as surely as someone must have been doing every day in speech, it seems a little closer and going faster than a running dog on the capitalist track to believe there were witty illiterates, and perhaps more frequently even the literate folks were more Salieri than Mozart, to use a well-worn, perhaps overwrought and unfair comparison, a funny little tune that may yet yield some good things.
Now we live in a time when we are all struggling with literal, literally using it more to emphasize than in its actual literal meaning, and even more problems with the non-literal in writing and speech, because frankly we weren’t there, and you had to have been there, or at least heard about it in the right way to follow the slings and arrows tossed about by every Will, Phil, and Emily. Go figure.
I mean you can’t make this stuff up. But people are constantly making this stuff up. They make it from the flotsam and jetsam of their indifferent reading, viewing, listening, and experiences too fierce to mention at a TMI slam. Are there those, BTW? Note to self: Never go there.
As a final thought, can we be certain in the history of our species, before, during, or, more likely after, has anyone ever when asked, Who out of history would you like to have a conversation with, answered, I think I’d like to interrogate some of Alexander the Great’s drinking buddies. I bet they’d have a few good stories, and not all of them that flattering.
Thank you very much.
I Dwell In Possibility 