Epergesis (e-per-gee’-sis): Interposing an apposition, often in order to clarify what has just been stated.
I was losing touch with everything, time, space, neon signs, ATMs, bicycle seats. You name it, I’m out of touch with it. I can’t “write”—I’m out of touch with my keyboard, so I am dictating this to my neighbor Marlene, who I am out of touch with, and who is out of touch, but who can hear me and more or less write down what I say. That’s not the case with my phone or any electronic device that could record me. Some days I’m so out of touch that I’m in another century!
It all started when I wanted to get totally out of touch with New York City where I had lived forever. The noise, the bustle and cost had finally gotten to me after 25 years of struggle. I had made a bundle of money and it was time to pack it in. I did some research and zeroed in on West Virginia. I bought a 200-year old cabin in Barnsmell Hollow. Given the condition of the road, I had to hire 10 porters to carry my worldly goods to my cabin. The lead porter, Jellby, said to me as we started out, “Don’t step on those gumdrops yonder on the trail. My brother Elroy stepped on one ‘en he’s still stuck there. We feed him every day, but he git’s cold in winter.” I thought he was joking, but actually, as I quickly learned, he was acutely out of touch. At first, I thought it was a genetic thing, resulting from bothers and sisters hooking up. But, I quickly rejected the “inbreeding” theory as an unfounded supposition rooted in prejudice.
As we passed Elroy, firmly glued to the ground, I thought, yes, Elroy is out of touch too. Maybe he’s hypnotized. Maybe he’s a world class trickster. Who knows? But he’s certainly out of touch. As a citizen of Barnsmell Hollow, I learned to accept things at face value, and eventually, like my fellow Barnsmellers, believe everything I heard or read, even ignoring contradictions. In New York, I would have been run over by a cab, or pushed out a window for thinking this way. I joined the Republican Party, whose representatives cultivate my Barnsmell thinking. Before I new it, I was completely out of touch and didn’t know it. It was bizarre knowing that I was completely out of touch and not knowing it.
I joined Barnsmell Hollow’s “Conspiracy Club.” We would meet once a week, on Friday’s, and discuss the latest conspiracy theories. Zebaluba said they would keep us in shape. “In shape” meant “out of touch.” We all agreed being out of touch let us be in touch with what we weren’t in touch with. Last Friday we discussed the way ants worked tirelessly for Hunter Biden, building an escape tunnel to Cuba, where he will become its next Emperor and fire missiles at Key West, Miami, and Las Vegas, where all his troubles started with Cher’s unwanted pregnancy and Hunter’s refusal to let her go to New York for an abortion. Instead, he made her snort so many crushed morning-after pills that she got a bloody nose and almost died. He recorded everything on his laptop, and left it at a tattoo parlor where it was found by a techie who will be cracking the password soon.
This was bombshell stuff and we reveled it in it, discovering the seductive pleasure of being out of touch and not knowing it, but “knowing it” as the real truth, unlike everyday people who don’t know what they don’t know, victims of the Socialist Democrat Hoax, and so-called self evident truth. Ha ha! I had a faint recollection of being in touch. Living in Barnsmell Hollow, I didn’t have to be in touch. I didn’t want to be in touch. I was out of it.
At this point Marlene stopped writing and said, “You’re so far out of touch, you could be Mayor of Barnsmell Hollow, or even Governor of West Virginia.” At that point there was a loud knocking at my cabin door. There were four men wearing camoflauge. One had a pair of handcuffs. “We are members of ‘Truth Touchers’ and your mother wants you to come back to New York to get you back in touch by deprograming you.” I struggled but they cuffed me and dragged me out to the highway to a waiting van.
We arrived at the clinic and the first thing they made me do was read “The New York Times” cover to cover. After intensive deprogramming over a period of four months, I got back in touch. When I looked at Marlene’s notes I discovered she had been drawing stick figures of people having sex. So, I had to reconstruct this all myself.
I will never doubt the sanctity of NYC again. I rejoined the Democrat Party, and now, I stay in touch.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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