Hysterologia (his-ter-o-lo’-gi-a): A form of hyperbaton or parenthesis in which one interposes a phrase between a preposition and its object. Also, a synonym for hysteron proteron.
There’s only one way to San Jose. I was stubborn. I wouldn’t admit there was more than one way to San Jose. Maybe “stubborn” is too kind a word. “Adamant” was too kind too. I think, basically, I was nutso. My pathological commitment to error constantly put me in jeopardy. When things were clearly up—as clear as Poland Springs—down I’d go into the abyss of error embracing it like the holy grail, or the latest iteration of the iPad, or Taylor Swift.
I was in despair. Everybody laughed at me, yet I couldn’t change my mind. It was frozen in error. It was like my brain was a slab of granite graven with idiocy that couldn’t be revised or erased.
I went to see a psychiatrist and she gave me medication designed to soften my mind. It would become pliable and I might be able to shake off my chronic commitment to error. If I could snap my mind like a bedsheet, I might be able to flatten it and prepare it for a fresh text. The medication was called “Mollis Cerebrum” (brain softener). The way I understood it, it was like stool softener for the mind. I wanted to hurry things up, so I took five Brain Softeners instead of one every two days as written on the bottle. Almost immediately, I felt my bogus beliefs melting away. By midnight, I had no beliefs, except the belief I had no beliefs. Suddenly, I felt my brain running out my nose. My overdose had liquified my brain! I stuck a pencil in each nostril to stem the flow of my brain. Then, I went to the meat packing plant where I worked. I hid in a walk-in freezer. I believed if I kept my brain near freezing, as slush it would stop running out my nose. I had on my warmest coat and had vowed to stay in the freezer until the drug wore off, and my brain returned to normalcy. I believed my brain was the medium of my mind, like I had learned from Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto a few years before—“The medium is the message” was chanted by the student body at football games and was on billboards all over Canada. In fact, my psychiatrist was a graduate of the U. of Toronto. She had taken classes from McLuhan!
Anyway, I was freezing my ass off.
They found me on Monday when the plant reopened. I was curled in a fetal position. My hair was covered in frost. The pencils in my nostrils had stopped the flow of my brain out of my nose, and the freezing temperate was pretty much icing on the cake. My butt cheeks had frozen to the freezer’s floor and had to be amputated.
I am fully recovered from my overdose ordeal. My brain is like a slab of cement again. My first impressions are still etched as true and can’t be revised by any means. There’s a new brain softener discovered in Spain called “Puré de Papas” (mashed potatoes) that my psychiatrist has recommended. I think I’m going to try it. I don’t know why.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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