Love Words

Every so often I get stuck on a word, using it to excess, permitting it to pepper pretty much everything I say.

I’m usually unaware that I’m doing this, blithely blabbing away repetitively, noticing it only after someone points it out – often to mortifying mirth – or, sometimes, in an attempt to squeeze it into every possible sentence, I contort its meaning so much that even I begin to detect my unconscious infatuation with the word.

My first word crush was with “humongous.” And what a humongous crush it was! The roller coaster was humongous, the center on the other team was humongous, that hill we rode our bikes down was humongous, the booger he flicked at my head was humongous. You get the idea. Pretty soon “humongous” morphed into an all-purpose modifier meaning something along the lines of “really big, really memorable, really cool, or all of the above.” And then one day one of the guys gave me a weird look, and asked what the hell “humongous” meant anyways, and why was I always saying it, and I realized then and there that I’d fallen in love with a word and I couldn’t admit that in front of the guys so I looked down and resolved to never utter it again.

And I didn’t, assisted, I’m sure, by this serial monogamist’s ability to shift his affections quickly and completely from word to word, usually unconsciously. I’ve loved and left so many words, I can’t remember most of them. Only a few stick out. I recall with shame my liberal use of “bathetic” and “plebeian” during my young snob days. How pathetic. Oh, and I overused “pathetic” then too. “Concatenation,” “synchronicity,”and “serendipity” somehow had their days in the sun. I’ll never succeed in submerging the painful memories of working the word “heuristic” into most of my grad school conversations for a month or so. What the hell was I thinking? And most painful of all was my realization, late in life, that I’d not only been overusing the word “excoriate,” I’d been mispronouncing it so that it sounding like “excruciate,” which is exactly how it felt when a work colleague pointed it out to me in a packed conference room.

The other day I realized I’d fallen for a new word after catching myself using it for the fiftieth time since lunch. My new love word is “absurd.” Their aggressive position on that issue is absurd. The shiny spinning rims on that Hummer are absurd. The Hummer itself is absurd. My need for disco music is absurd. The President is absurd. The other side, they’re absurd too. Television is all absurd. Writing anonymous blog posts that reveal while they conceal is just absurd. Trudging through an incredibly fortunate life under a perpetual cloud of depression is, well, so absurd it’s depressing. It’s all absurd.

And then I checked the dictionary definition, saw that “absurd” has two meanings, one of them “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous” and I thought, yeah, that’s exactly how things seem to me. Nothing makes sense. Everything is wrong. All I see are contradictions. Life is imbalanced. There is no point. And then I read the other definition, for “absurd” as a noun, as in “the absurd,” and it was:

the state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning

and I thought EXACTLY! It is all The Absurd. What a great word. No wonder I’m so attached to it. And, to illustrate the absurdity of it all, at the same time I’m feeling this frisson of rare pleasure with this discovery of my new love interest, I know that my predilection to see the absurd in everything is at the very root of my depression. Dwelling on the absurd, I’m like a smoker with lung cancer puffing away, or an alcoholic with cirrhosis drinking away. I know this, yet I do it anyways. Maybe I can’t stop. Or maybe I can, and choose not to. Either way, it’s all so absurd.

Beer Me

I am currently obsessed with the mid-life musical musings of Amy Rigby, the mod housewife.

I am depressed, a condition more likely to afflict women than men. And in order to heal myself, I am getting in touch with my feelings.

I’m learning French.

Yesterday I dropped my car off for service, was told it would take a couple of days, was sent to the loaner car desk, was informed that we’re so sorry, we only have two pick-up trucks left, and I said PICK-UP TRUCKS! Are you sure you don’t have any cars available? I’d really hate to drive a truck.

The only television show I hate to miss? The Gilmore Girls.

I am in the middle of reading the novels of Jane Austen. All of them. For like the fifth time.

And I was reading one of these novels the other day when the television distracted me and I asked them to turn it down and noticed that it was the Pro Bowl. I left the room.

I find my wife’s friends more interesting than their husbands. I find them more interesting than my friends. Or at least I would, if I had any.

My work acquaintances – the few people I talk to voluntarily – are all female.

My correspondence? Almost exclusively with women. The fact that I correspond at all? Feminine.

I am sexist, and irredeemably so, for nothing will ever convince me that women are equal to men. They are, of course, vastly superior. Humans 2.0. I’m a traitor to my own sex.

I’ve started to pay attention to how I look. I even worry I’m getting fat. And I permit a woman to dress me in fashionable threads.

Brokeback Mountain moved me.

Now don’t get the wrong idea, I’m still a flaming hetero. Nothing’s changed there. Or has it? Something is happening here. What it is, though, is not exactly clear. Could it be that I’ve allowed my deep and abiding fascination with women to carry me away, so far away that I’m only just beginning to discover, buried deep inside this middle-aged man but yearning to break free, a middle-aged lesbian?

I need a beer. Not that I want one. I just need one.

Blindfold

I used to think I knew myself. I flattered myself, in fact, that I looked deeper inside than most, that I had clearer eyes than most, that I analyzed more than most.

I was looking, all right, but I was only seeing the inside of a blindfold.

For the past year, I’ve had this nagging sense of my own blindness. The more I probed, observed and analyzed, the less I understood. I didn’t add up. I didn’t connect. I made no sense.

You can only do so much working with darkness.

But all that probing, observing and analyzing did accomplish something. It weakened the fabric of the blindfold. I picked at a thread until it was loose, pulled it and twisted it and worked it up and down until the whole thing started to unravel.

Then suddenly it disintegrated.

Now I can see, but I can’t bear to look. The sudden glare is too much for someone who’s worn a blindfold his entire life. And I’m afraid that even if I could keep my eyes open, I wouldn’t like what they’d see. So I’m keeping my eyes tightly shut.

This state is uneasy. It cannot last. My mind is filled with thoughts derived from the dark. I no longer trust them. But my mind has yet to admit any thoughts derived from the light. So it’s useless. And stuck. It’s like an infinite loop. Or maybe it’s fractured. Or shattered. I cannot tell.

Meanwhile I’m moving slowly towards the light, feeling my way along, listening carefully, trying to comprehend what I’ve never experienced. I can mouth the words, I can recite their dictionary definitions, but I cannot understand them. And those words are supposed to be my goal. But so far they’re just words.

All I know is my normal may be abnormal, but it’s still normal to me.

And if I sometimes find myself furtively groping for another blindfold, maybe you can understand. After all, if there’s one thing I do know, it’s how to fly blind.