Bananagrams
How did it start? Oh right, all of us sitting in his dining room, totally rapt in a jolly match of Bananagrams. Familiar with Bananagrams? If so, you know how quickly it turns boring if you play “traditional.” That is to say, without imposing any constraints, and without taking out (or adding in, now that I think of it, that too might sustain a handful of rounds) any runic glyphs, if you catch my drift.
So I’m looking at X, black ink stiff against faux-ivory. My compatriots chat about Musk and his sparkling cars. X, I fancy, has a status in his company’s mythology. Stalking through a gigafactory floor in my mind (I got many such hangars in this old thing, don’t you worry), a mint condition X-car (is that what it is?) rolls by, hardly making a sound. A futuristic chromium cougar, I’d say. Good thing I’m not part of that ad group. Musk’s got no ad group for his cars, I’m told. Okay. Still I find that I’m thinking as an adman would. With fantastic lighting that highlights this or that part. Occasionally, I’m afraid, my brain moonlights as an ad-producing algorithm, thinking in product ads, with foul promotional lingo always jingling around: all-original, mint-condition, multi-functional, holiday gift-quality, luxury brand; low pricing, individual savings, trailblazing packaging, full customization, non-imitation vinyl trim—you know? Anyway, I’m looking at X, and naturally my curiosity asks, who was first to think up this colossally popular form of play? Bananagrams, that is, if you so soon forgot.
Wait. Don’t look so put off. My skills of phrasing don’t stand tall by yours, okay, but try to follow my train of thought anyway, you might find it’s worth it.
As I was saying, my curiosity is back. Bananagrams: who thought it up, and just as importantly, why hadn’t I? I commonly brood about originators and such things. Did a curving banana lightbulb flash during a tantalizing night of scrabbling? Bananagrams is obviously an appropriation of that family hobby. But it’s not as communistic, crucially finishing with as many individual vocabulary mosaics as you had participants. In Bananagrams, industrialization occurs according to a classic capitalist fantasy: a public program is cast off in favor of rival railroads that branch out absurdly quickly, thanks to division of labor or privatization or similar bogus claptrap.
At a minimum, you must admit you’d profit from a round of Bananagrams with a constraint or twist. Back to my story, I’m playing with my pal Wycliff and his smoking hot sis Morgan. Following a discussion about a particularly common symbol in Anglo-Saxon, all of us unanimously concur to apply a limitation, and Wycliff starts taking out thirty or so glyphs.
You’ll want to try this on your own. All I can say is that my companions and I do this for a bit, straining to find words that will work (it’s difficult!), upon which Wycliff is struck by a fanciful notion, and starts talking in this way too.
As a scholar and a prodigious pupil of Gallic books, Morgan holds forth on a gimmicky Parisian roman which idiosyncratically riffs on what was lost during Adolf’s Holocaust by omitting a crucial unit of our Latin syllabary.
And you can spy this author’s analogy: his country, and his world, having lost so many offspring of Abraham, was in truth not so dissimilar from a limping idiom, still walking but full of scars, missing its most vital part.
Morgan is taking pains to say this point without falling for any traps or making any misprints, if you’ll allow my locution — oh, now I’m chuckling softly. At this point Wycliff says, man I could go for a cannabis high, which is not badly put if you grant him a bit of charity, which you should, mind you, this gambit is fabulously difficult.
So us two go downstairs just as ravishing Morgan calls it a night and climbs up to what was Wycliff’s room, prior to a shuffling of boudoirs last spring (thanks to which Wycliff’s flaky pillow is now found across a thin wall from a mum dishwashing unit). Wycliff and I stand by twin glass doors smoking, or toking, as Portland’s youth might say, dainty gray wisps curling up from Wycliff’s glass apparatus. Upon attaining a salubrious and hazy cast of mind (having again shown this plant’s dizzying psychoactivity and rainbow imprint on my disposition) both of us find it amusing to go on with this act. I’m in a sunny mood and so is my co-actor. At my turn I launch into an ambitious if occasionally halting soliloquy, upon which Wycliff cuts in to broadcast his own.
Wycliff cannot talk about his girl. What you got is an honorific with two taboos. This occasions my proposal, which I forward with gusto. An allonym: how about Suzuki? No, quoth Wycliff. Allow us to discuss sports.
No sports; most look taboo, to this narrator anyway, though football’s still good, actually. And sport discussions wax boring anyway. At this point Wycliff commits a gigantic faux pas and playacts a painful hara-kiri. Soon both of us cannot stop laughing. Now I do wrong by Wycliff, with a humiliating infraction, and I too succumb to a mock dying with dramatic flourish.
Wycliff is going on about “a collapsing pyramid of chimps” which I find riotously funny. Following this, Wycliff brings up a famous monorchid cyclist, whom all of us should call “Mr. Thighstrong” from now on. What’s it got to do with that “olfactory lobotomy for coronavirus victims” my pal is insisting on? It’s not obvious right away, to this critic at minimum, but it is hilarious. Is humor simply an affair of thwarting assumptions with unorthodox insinuations? I’d say so, particularly if marijuana clouds still float about.
Drowsy, I go upstairs and try to nap, shutting my thick lids and picturing a bucolic background. No luck. Audibly mumbling in this by-now familiar fashion, my inborn narrator will just not stop. I’m not catching anything of much import though. Just a Bananagrams of words, not totally random, nor truly logical.
