Appositio

Appositio (ap-po-sit’-i-o): Addition of an adjacent, coordinate, explanatory or descriptive element.

I was going crazy—hearing sounds, seeing things, descending into paranoia. My hamster was talking to me, complaining about living alone in a cage and his squeaky hamster wheel and shitty brown food pellets. He wanted the expensive green organic kind that they sell in the health food section of the pet store. I was tempted to run him through the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. He knew what I was up to and started yelling “hamstercide, hamstercide!” So, I put him in the toaster oven. Just as I was going to turn the knob to broil and send him to a gruesome death, he banged on the glass and said “I can pick stocks. You put the stock market page and the financial news in the bottom of my cage. I’ve become good at piking stocks.”

I gave him a second chance and freed him from the toaster oven. I said “Ok Mr. Stock Picker, have at it.” He crawled into his cage, looked at the newspaper and said “I’d put everything into ‘Rose Garden,’ a small company specializing in the manufacture of wooden Dixie Cup spoons. They’re located in Maine where there’s lots of wood.”

He sounded so authoritative. I invested my life savings in Rose Garden. Two days later they went out of business and my hamster had disappeared. I looked all over my house and finally found him under the living room couch snuggled up in a sock I had lost two years go. I asked him why he ruined my life. He just sat there and wiggled his nose and made his happy hamster grunting sound. I picked him up and started to strangle him when I realized he couldn’t talk—that he could never talk, that his speech had been a hallucination—a symptom of my loony hood. I couldn’t believe that I almost murdered my little hamster. Then he said to me, “That was a close call Bozo!” I resisted my desire to wring his neck, but I realized it was a hallucination. I just had to ignore him—it wasn’t real.

But he wouldn’t shut up. All day and into the night, blah, blah, blah. He talked about the weather, the New Testament, his favorite TV show—endless yapping. At first, I was interested, even though I knew I was imagining it. But I got to the point where I couldn’t stand it any more. I threw my hamster out of my third floor window. I saw him hit the sidewalk and die. Poor little thing, but it was for the best. It would help me regain some of my sanity.

It didn’t.

The talking hamster moved inside my head, even though he was dead. I started vocalizing the hamster’s inside-my-head talk. His voice became my voice. I would complain about my squeaky exercise wheel, my smelly cedar shavings, and my constipation from cheap food pellets.

After I burglarized a pet store and tried to get away with a 25 lb bag of high-end food pellets, I was arrested. It was determined that I was suffering from “mental issues.” Now, I am comfortably ensconced in “Pearly Pillow” mental institution in Topeka, Kansas. My hamster voice hasn’t gone away, but I’ve learned to live with it, “Would you care for a handful of organic handmade food pellets?”

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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