Correctio (cor-rec’-ti-o): The amending of a term or phrase just employed; or, a further specifying of meaning, especially by indicating what something is not (which may occur either before or after the term or phrase used). A kind of redefinition, often employed as a parenthesis (an interruption) or as a climax.
“I am going to be famous someday—not just famous. I’ll be more than famous. I’ll be a legend, almost a deity. Look at me! What do you see?” I told him I saw a lunatic. He was wearing see-through harem pants, a sweater with a snowmobile on it, and a pair of pointy Mexican tribal boots (botas tribaleras). He also had a wand, which looked like a gun barrel. He aimed it at me and I thought I was going to die. It made a loud cracking sound, like a gunshot. But it wasn’t a gunshot. It was about two-dozen Q-tips that came flying at me. They had been dipped in taco sauce so my clothes would be stained with a red blood-like liquid.
“Why don’t you do something worthy of a legend?” I yelled. He said, “Coming right up!” “This should be good” I said to myself. We had gone to high school together and I knew he was bluffing. He had backed off on burning down the school. He had chickened out on blowing up the Driver Ed car. He had never asked Ms. Tardy, our gym teacher, out on a date. He failed to seed the school cafeteria lunch with laxatives. The only thing he’d ever done was pee on the school fuse box and nearly be electrocuted, moaning and crying as he was taken away in an ambulance. So, I couldn’t wait to see what was “Coming right up.”
I think it was suicide.
He went in his house’s garage and closed the door. I heard his dad’s car start. He was going for carbon monoxide poisoning! What an idiot. There was no way killing himself in his garage would make him a legend. Yelling at him through the garage door, I explained this to him. The car’s engine shut off and the garage door opened. Then I realized: he could become a legend for being a world-class idiot, which he was.
He was ecstatic when I told him. He ran down the driveway waving his wand. He turned to thank me and tripped over his black and white pedal police car he had left in the middle of the driveway. He landed in the street where his head was squashed by a passing “Jolly Clown Ice Cream” truck. There was a bunch of kids following the truck, clamoring for ice cream whose lives were forever altered by the squashed head.
For some reason I couldn’t stop laughing at the squashed head. I am in counseling to find the answer. My therapist told me to be prepared to come to the conclusion that his gruesome death was funny. We practice recounting the event and fake laughing together, like Santa Claus (Ho, Ho, Ho), and slapping each other on the back. So far, it isn’t working.
The hardest part of my therapy is having to keep a photo of the crushed head in a frame on my bedside table. It is the first thing I see in the morning. Yesterday, I almost laughed when I saw it. I think I might be making progress.
This phase of my life has made me want to be a coroner, like on television detective shows. I will be called Dr, Squish, after my specialty in squished heads. Right now, it is only a dream. If I can get a scholarship, my dream will come true.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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