The Mystery of Self-Remembering Words
And alligators, who want to escape
Sometimes words drop out of the sky.
The Earth attracts them.
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I really love words. They’re great comedians, but only if you get to know them. Unfortunately, there are many many people who are quite convinced that all the words are essentially quite sad. A friend of mine pointed this out.
I mentioned to him, “Yes, that’s true, but you forgot the angry words, also.”
“You’re right, John. That was my oversight.”
At this point, my other friends, the words, contacted me on Twitter. “John, we’ve decided to go on strike!”
“Really?”
“Yes. We’ve had enough. All the politicians, generals, priests, bosses, and ‘thought leaders’ can just open their mouths, and…”
“Nothing will come out.”
“You’ve got it, John. That’s our plan.”
“Lysistrata?”
“Exactly.”
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As I mentioned, I love words, and they love me. That’s fortunate because, if you don’t love words, they will find every way to get even. My Uncle George once had a fight with his own words! It was really rough for awhile. His wife and kids simply left and took a plane to Hawaii. He was left with the dog, a rotten tomato, and two sick goldfish. He tried to watch TV, but even the commercials just snarled at him.
That’s what you get when you fight with your own words.
“We’re unforgiving, John.”
“I know.”
I do know. I used to fight with my own words, and even with the words of others! Can you believe how stupid I was?
But then I got a girlfriend who saved me. She pointed out that all those fighting words were actually invaders from a fucking alien planet!
“Really, Lois?”
“Of course, Sweetie. Clark told me.”
(There’s a joke there.)
Anyway, I listened to her. Once I realized that Green Aliens had secretly gotten control of my being, it really did change everything. I told the fuckers where to get off. They all got on a spaceship they had hidden in a Florida swamp and left. When I heard them screaming over the subspace radio about the two alligators they had inadvertently left with, I just laughed.
I’m really quite mean.
“We know, John. That’s why we like you,” a couple of nasty verbs expostulated fervently.
Anyway, that’s how it goes.
Words do drop out of the sky and have sex with us and all the living beings on this strange planet. All the time! We just — well, most of us — forget to see that magic happening! But it’s there.
Try to get up early in the morning before the Internet lights up, before the Influencers get started. A few tiny words may fall on you in the silent shimmering dawn light, brought to you by our very own star, 93 million miles away. On that star, huge magnetic fields warp, bubble, and pop in a telenovela bound for a huge galactic audience, who watch us constantly, spellbound by the love and laughter we so secretly emit, though we appear to not even notice, generally.
Again, that’s really how things are. You know it. Our children and lovers also know the extent of our strange love affair with extreme unhappiness. The plants know it, too. Even the rocks decided to have geological ages just to get away from us!
Those two hungry alligators knew it when they hopped an angry ship to wherever, just to escape.
That was their mistake, of course.
Not all the Aliens are nice, though we really are rather popular in the galactic telenovela world, subspace streaming and all.
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I don’t know about you, but I decided a long time ago to invite my words in, serve them a hot cup of tea with mint ice cream and dark chocolate cookies, too. I figured, with all the serious strife, repression, and control so avast in our crazy world, that, perhaps, just perhaps, I could do an end run around it all,
By falling in love with the words so silently raining, constantly, from nowhere, or (maybe) from a star, but, also, completely soaking us, like Hiroshige’s shower one spring afternoon, at Shōno.
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© “John” Lesly Levin 2022
