I am, for all intents and purposes, back, but any real update will have to wait until at least tomorrow. I’m still re-acclimating. I hope your holidays were as happy as mine. For the time being, here’s my second-to-last (thus far, at any rate) “Trousers Talk” column. For those of you following along at home (and I know who you are), this would be #11 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10). I offer no explanations. I just write the damn things:
Call me Ishmael. It’s not my name, and I won’t answer, but I want to make sure I’m pronouncing it correctly. I am always pronouncing words incorrectly. My doctor, whose clinical skill I admire almost as much as his milky white thighs, says this is because I am stupid and ought to be shot. I think maybe he just needs to relax, and possibly take a vacation, and I would tell him so myself only I’m afraid I might mispronounce it and he’d just think I was asking to take a bubble bath with him again. I don’t need a repeat of that mistake, thank you very much.
But the truth is, words are funny things, and they can mean different things to different people. Take, for instance, the seemingly innocent phrase “vibrating panty snatcher”. It has a variety of uses, and, given the proper context, I’m sure it can seem perfectly acceptable. But its use is probably inappropriate at, let’s say, your wife’s mother’s funeral, especially when what you’re supposed to be reading from is a passage in the book of psalms. Say what you will about the Bible, it almost never mentions the word panties. It also almost never mentions the sort of bizarre obscenities my wife spat out at me in the car after the funeral, but that’s another story and there’s little cause to go reliving it now.
Because that isn’t the point. The point, as I think I mentioned before, is that words are funny things. Take, as another example, the phrase “machine tool components”. Now, maybe it’s just me (because, I’ll admit, it usually is), but there has always seemed to be something vaguely sexual about that. Not that I want to start rubbing myself in strange places with machine tools or their components — I’m pretty sure that would hurt, and it would probably stain the carpet — but the words themselves have a curious rhythm that has always seemed somewhat sensual to me, evocative of dark street corners and unknown fluids exchanged. The words themselves roll off the lips, and it isn’t their meaning so much as their sound that gets to me. There is a certain mellifluous music to them, much in the same way that there is music, for instance, in the French language, which one can appreciate even if one doesn’t understand a damn thing those weird freaks are saying.
In fact, for the longest time, I thought it might be nice to write a column entirely in French. I realized, of course, that since I don’t know any French, you would probably just get annoyed and walk out on me. People are always walking out on me for things like that. My first wife, Enid, walked out on me after only five weeks of marriage, which I think upset our minister, since he had picked three and a half weeks in the betting pool and lost fifty bucks. Enid was a good woman, and I don’t blame her for leaving, but I don’t need to start alienating all of you as well by merci beaucoup-ing all over the place, now do I?
The bottom line is, words are weird, and that’s really all I’ve got to say about that. You can stop calling me Ishmael now if you want.
Again, more tomorrow, once I’m rested and I’m finished playing with some of my new toys.