‘Tuck’, Lies and a Videotape : Also has a Ninja, a Lizard and some Frogs

The world really is round. Things come and go in circles. In cycles, if you must. They go, and then they come around all over again. Things as objective as seasons and as so not as reasons. Your motivations, the motor whirring under the front lid of the yellow car you call your life, are almost equally, if not more, fickle.

Rewind.

You are Joe. You’re 10. Its a sparkling bright washing machine Sunday morning. You are on the phone, and its Daddy on the other end. “You can come over next weekend, promise, tiger. Daddy’s gotta work today. But we’ll have fun, throw the ‘ol pigskin around, have pizza, and yeah , kick the hell outta that ninja that’s been buggin’ ya. Kiss Mommie fer me.” The doorbell rings. Its Stan. The guy who’s currently screwing Mommie. You hate him. He’s a loser. Thinning pate. Red tees over blue jearns, and a bown alligator belt with a metal buckle that says “Tuck”. There’s just this one thing that Stan could possibly have to his credit. He drives a truck. Interstate. Alone. While Daddy’s crunching numbers in monotone  and filing redundant data into his Mac, Stan drives a 20 tonner at 160 across meadows and deserts and ravines and, possibly, oceans. Maybe it’s just out of spite for your own father, maybe it’s to salvage the awesome profession from uncool assholes like Stan, but right now, in that very moment you hear the ‘click’ at the other end, if there’s one thing you’d give an arm and a leg to do, it’d be to drive a truck. A big shiny steel truck.

You are Crayton. You’re 18. You have a stubble. A guitar. A stash. And a scowl. You’ve read some books, looked up some of the harder words and listened to almost all of Floyd. You go watch this movie they’re talking about excitedly in smoky eyeglassed circles, and you realize you have it. The answer. And it’s surely different this time, you feel. For one, it’s not 42. And didn’t the ‘like really cool’ babe sitting next to you with brown wavy hair and breasts that pointed the politically correct way through her Peace! tee, she of the Mensa lineage, she of the yoga in spare time and hugging the endangered whatsitsname scaled beige lizard found in Tahiti in the rest of it, tell you it was gonna be here ? Soon. That it’d be so strong and so powerful and that it’d blow away every little piece of crap that believed otherwise.The screens go blank. You stumble out, squinting, into the sun. But wait ! You f’got to ask her what exactly was it that you were supposed to believe in ?! What if IT blew you away too ?! You weren’t chaff, you were pretty sure of that. But why weren’t you ?!

You are Val. You’re 27. You work as assistant to this chemist. You don’t think much about anything. Except for frogs. And an occasional lager. “Why frogs ?” is a question you haven’t been asked many times, possibly because not many people know you exist. Which is kind of good, since you probably don’t know the answer yourself. And a frank admission to that effect, a simple yet enigmatic “I don’t know. Come to think of it, I never really thought of it that way !” honestly won’t pave way for any further conversation or even as little as enquiry. You know people aren’t really interested in frogs. They aren’t interested in much else either, but they’d do better pretending they know about the Greenhouse effect and Hilton’s latest sex tape than about frogs. You’re weird, and it’s good that you know it. Because otherwise, it’d just be a whole lot of pain.

Rewind harder. Kindergarten. A classroom bustling with kids, who fall over and hug and kiss others they can not even know yet. The teacher has a question. “What dya wanna be when you grow up ?” Huh ?! What kind of a question is that to be asking someone who talks with a drool perpetually hung at the base of his lower lip, can’t even wipe it off by himself ?  Surprise, surprise, though. The retarded looking kid has an answer. “Sailor”, he says, pretty solemnly. The teacher beams at him, with a smile as wide  as a canyon. She says it’s really good that he wants to be a sailor. That distinguishes him from others, like other things differentiated them from him. Also, he could sail around the world, see new lands, meet new people. She didn’t say where he’d get the food to eat from. But, then , kindergarten is supposed to be simple. Many years later, he was in a lecture hall, listening to another teacher talk about how personality is something that helps people fit in, be compatible, work in an organization. And, as if on cue, as if irony needed epiphany, the primordial question is popped, again, this time in a room full of adults, in a classroom full of scholars.

I lied.

“…he Do the Police in different voices !” : Lamenting Language

It is amazing how words seem just that when all you are doing is listening or reading. Amazing too, how some words, when crowded together, maybe in the same breath, do something more than just stand in a queue, formally called a sentence, and shout, “Read , read!”. Ordinarily, they’d just be ball bearings, rolled in between ruled blue lines, while a high school essay, a newspaper headline, a suicide note or an alimony contract slides over them, as smoothly as possible. That, nonetheless, is why language was invented. To be as effective a vehicle for thought as can be. To provide little or no friction to communication. To be a mute canvas, a non conflicting backdrop for human interaction. Quite.

Here’s a short story. A long time, let us say, four score and eighty hundred years, ago a fine gentleman noticed something funny. Or maybe someone else before him did, but was afraid to own up to it for fear of being branded a heretic and burnt, or being drawn and quartered, or disembowelled/dismembered. Or maybe he was straight and just wasn’t amused by funny things since most of whatever they called life then wasn’t. In any case, we had a eureka moment. Or wait, what if it was before Archimedes? Sheesh ! Digressions kill. So do indigestions. Either way, our man was walking down the Bridge on this beautifully bright day when lo and behold ! he heard someone shout, ” Baked buns, blueberry biscuits, buy a bunch, get a bunch free !”. Yeah, okay, so i added that last bit !.

Our man, who we’ll call Bob for the story’s sake, was befuddled and beguiled. What was it? Surely, ’twas not illegal for people to sell their ware on the street. This generally needed making some noise as a device to attract attention too. What then was so unmistakably ungainly about the whole affair ?! And then, right when he crossed the orchid seller who beat his wife every Wednesday, it hit him. He jumped for joy while the epiphany eluded everyone else.

Bob died of Beriberi on his Birthday. Sheesh !

Alliteration is one of the many ways of rusting the aforementioned bearings of language, metaphorically. Metaphor is another. Figures of speech provide flavor and flair to the dry as desert structure of common word usage. This is accomplished by breaking the flow of thought transmission by a sudden change in semantic structure; either incongruous, or more than average lyrical, or just plain weird. The reaction is a subconscious equivalent of “What the …?!”. Precisely because the effect isn’t very pronounced, it provides the occasional clever court jester opportunity to show off for the Queen and the occasional slick marketing executive chance to get an inside track with the target buyer.

Consider alliterations, again. Ever wondered why all tongue twisters are, almost without exception, alliterative in nature ? Okay, so this crackpot allegory may have no neuro/psycho logical backing but is it a really huge leap of imagination to assume that maybe, there’s a fixed, finite quota of each alphabet, or more generally, each sound, in the universe ?! And that , maybe, the universe prefers lower entropy, phonetically. So maybe, it’s the universe’s fault that she can’t sell sea shells at the sea shore. The universe would seem to be against this particular figure of speech, though this certainly doesn’t explain the Big Bang, its alliterative genesis. But then nothing much explains the Big Bang so we may as well skip this inconsistency. Whichever reason suffices, it’s kind of an established fact that our brains slow down while processing alliterative structures. And that momentary lapse of reason is precisely what the poet and the copywriter hopes and aims for. Trust me on this one, this was what was on Richard Wilbur’s mind when he wrote Junk:

Of plastic playthings, paper plates.

and on Walt Disney’s, when he created that legend of a rodent, Mickey Mouse and the equally famous feather ball Donald Duck. What do you think of Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Dilton Doiley and Moose Mason ?! Want superheroes ? Peter Parker. Bruce Banner. Clark Kent is phonetically alliterative. Meanwhile, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luther and Lionel Luther are every which way. Coca Cola is alliterative. So is the World Wide Web. I wonder if there’s much that isn’t.

Heard through the grapevine ( which essentially means I made this up , which in turn means I expect unmitigated admiration and worship for creating this awesome a thing !)

Q : Why doesn’t it take ‘four’ to tango ?

A : Beacause that’s not alliterative !

I don’t have much else to write. I’ll just reiterate the universe’s sentiments, that someday, there’s gotta be about enough of crazy, cheesy and crappy alliterations. Borrowed heavily from the 1999 movie Mystery Men, when the three protagonists are trying to decide what they’ll call their superhero group.

- Wait! Wait, that’s it. We are the Super Squad.

- No, no! Alliteration in these situations is corny.