Friday, April 24, 2015

Textual Orientation


1.  What we in the business call “a grabber.”  Definitely the word to use to GUARANTEE I’m going to keep reading.

2.  At this point, slightly hoping the conjunction is an autocorrect for the word “butt."

3.  Disappointed by the “butt” letdown, yet intrigued:  the location of some item is SO CONSTANT and familiar that NOT finding it qualifies as “bizarre”!?!  How will the sentence conclude?
  •      “can’t find/Mount Rushmore”
  •      “can’t find/my cellphone”
  •      “can’t find/the number 7 on my cellphone”
  •      “can’t find/the second floor of my local Costco”
  •      “can’t find/my pulse”
  •      “can’t find/Waldo”

4. Okay, so a bit tame for a conclusion.  Bizarre?  Really?  I suppose if the headband had been tattooed on or stapled to the texter’s head when she lay down for a nap and was gone when she woke up...or if it looked like this in which case it would be hard to miss...

5.  I’m starting to think the headband didn’t belong to the texter.  So, the owner of the headband entrusted the texter with the sacred responsibility of guarding this precious object

6.  Though this is the lone use of “textspeak,” one must admire the texter's economy of language:  she saved herself precious microseconds by eschewing the other two-thirds of this pronoun.

7.  Here, one admires the texter’s decision to refuse the banal, culturally destructive “textspeak” version of this word.  In reading the entire second-person syllable here, one cannot help but imagine the expressive freedom that dominated the texter’s mind at the moment of thumbing these letters.  In what is perhaps best described as the most appropriate and ironic “YOLO” moment, she elects to “live large,” to express each word expansively, and to let the reader have an opportunity to savor and appreciate the lines and circle of a Y and an O that might otherwise have gone missing from his or her day.  The devil-may-care attitude almost literally DRIPS from the two extra letters, as though they say, “Yeah, that’s right, us two characters might not need to be here, but we are.  Got a problem with that?  I mean, what is this, Twitter?”

8.  ONE person with TWO headbands?  This possibility is so absurdly improbable, one wonders how the texter was even able to conceive of such an eventuality.  Such a circumstance would be even more bizarre (if that’s possible) than the headband going missing in the first place.

9.  The mind reels.  Logical whiplash ensues.  If we have this right, then the lack of that first headband, and the unlikely possibility of obtaining a second headband, are circumstances that can be rectified by the acquisition of ICE.  There are, clearly, only two ways in which this deductive argument can be true:
  • the texter’s family exclusively uses headband-shaped ice-cube trays and these will effectively hold the textee’s hair in place, though they will also create an ongoing brain-freeze originating outside her skull; OR
  • the headband was ACTUALLY required as a makeshift fanbelt in some sort of MacGuyver-esque refrigeration unit, which now cannot be completed, meaning that the...cryogenically preserved head of Walt Disney? platter of llama patties? butter-sculpture of comedic acting legend Charles Grodin?...will begin moving dangerously close to room temperature and spoilage.
10.  LOVING the choice of conjunction here, given the two things that are connected.

11.  If the first word was the grabber, the last word surpasses all other conceivable endings.  

Let’s assume that this word was “papertowels,” but mistyped (or possibly a shrewd employment of abbreviated “textspeak,” freeing the texter of the nuisance involved in typing an extra E and L - see #6).  Much of #9 applies here, though if in fact the ice is ALSO being provided (evidenced by the word "AND" - see #10), then the fact that the papertowels are frozen would seem to be redundant.  

UNLESS the papertowels serve a function distinct from the ice, a function that requires them to be frozen (it is assumed by this writer that in order to be frozen, said papertowels would first have to be steeped in some liquid such as Apple & Eve Pomegranate-Blueberry Juice or bat urine or, if neither of these is available, water).

MORE AS THE MOOD SUITS ME...

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