Coenotes (cee’-no-tees): Repetition of two different phrases: one at the beginning and the other at the end of successive paragraphs. Note: Composed of anaphora and epistrophe, coenotes is simply a more specific kind of symploce (the repetition of phrases, not merely words).
When I was younger, I more less knew what was going on. I could see clearly and I could hear what people were saying, and understand them. I could actually run a few hundred feet, especially if I was being chased by a bully or a cop. I could balance my checkbook and do the boogie-woogie all night long. I would go to bars solely to meet women, talk to them for 10 or 15 minutes and then head to my place with them to boogie-woogie all night long, and then, after a boogie-woogie night, go to I-HOP for breakfast: a medley of grease, bacon, eggs, syrup-soaked pancakes, and cups and cups of hot black coffee, followed by a couple of Newports and a candy mint. After breakfast, I’d wait outside the liquor store, licking my lips, thinking about a couple shots of “Dancing Bolshevik” vodka chased with the tomato juice I kept in a cooler in my trunk. After a couple of 100 proof liquid cuties, I headed off to work, half drunk, and ready for another day of pretending to work and complaining. I worked folding pizza boxes at “John Smith Pizza.” It’s “gimmick” was its non-Italian pizza, like peanut butter and jelly, or American cheese topped with pork and beans. They called their pizzas “Flat-Circle Open Face Sandwiches.” Quite a mouthful, ha -ha. Business was terrible, but they had “backers.” Big Joe would show up once a month with a bag of “laundry” to run through the cash register. Memories never get old!
When I was younger, I more or less knew what was going on. Now that I’m an old man, it is the other way around. I take a small handful of Adderall everyday to “keep me in the conversation.” I wake up 4 or 5 times during the night to pee. I sleep with a headlamp strapped on my head because I can’t find the light switch in the dark. I inevitably accidentally turn on the ceiling fan by mistake and blow crap all over my room, tripping over socks and slipping on unpaid bills, sometimes wetting my pajamas. Without my glasses, the world looks like an oil slick. I don’t get Social Security payments because I never reported any wages. Instead, I am on the dole—I get a block of cheese, 2lbs of lard, powdered milk, and a pack of chewing gum each month from the state, $100 per month from “Stayin’ Alive,” a charity founded by a very successful Bee Gees cover band, and $200 per month for posing as an advocate for the abolishment of Medicare. Most of the time I sit in my apartment (paid for by the state) waiting to poop and watching TV. My favorite shows have all gone the way of the DoDo bird. TV stinks, but I watch it to stay in touch with reality. If it wasn’t for FOX News I would be clueless. I wish they’d bring back Ed Sullivan, but he’s dead. The Ed Sullivan Show was the shiniest gem in the crown of my youth. Memories never get old!
I get meals on wheels every night for dinner. Clay, the guy who delivers my food, acts like he’s casing my apartment to rob it when he comes to deliver the food and finds me dead. He can have it! Probably my heated toilet seat is the most valuable thing I own, and it doesn’t work right anyway. Two weeks ago I burned my ass on it. I had to go to the hospital. They gave me some ointment and a kid’s inflatable pool toy to sit on—it was a “My Little Pony” floatie—pink and baby blue.
My walker is second-hand and is missing a wheel. So, I replaced the missing wheel with a slit tennis ball. As long as the fuzz holds out on the ball, I can shuffle along almost fast enough so people don’t push me out of the way. But, I’ve learned how to raise my walker and threaten people with it. I knocked a teen punk down a couple of days ago and his head made a hollow-melon sound when it hit the pavement. Sometimes the tennis ball gets stuck in a crack in the pavement and I go around in circles until a passerby gives it a kick.
Now, aside from all my old man maladies, all I have are memories—memories that I mostly can’t remember, but that’s better than nothing! My most vivid memory is being bitten by a squirrel when I was around 16. I sneaked up behind it and grabbed it by the tail. It bit me on the thumb.
Just because I’m alone, it doesn’t mean I’m lonely! It means I am desperate for somebody in addition to Clay, the predatory Meals on Wheels Guy, to pay me a visit. I was thinking of throwing my TV out of my window, or lighting myself on fire and standing in the widow as ploys for getting people to come up to my apartment and visit me. I decided the window gambits were crazy. Instead, I bought a stolen laptop from Clay for next to nothing. I have joined a couple of online senior-citizen dating sites. There’s one that is especially good. It’s called “Hot Bags” and features “over-70 female hotties who will help you rise up and be merry.” It has a live feed from a nursing home “somewhere in California” that is themed after Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy Bunny Hutch.” Need I say more? I am making new memories for $12.00 per month.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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