Climax (cli’-max): Generally, the arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance, often in parallel structure.
I was sleeping. I was dreaming. It was a nightmare! Zoot-suited zombies were getting ready to push my foot into a wood chipper. They were swinging their pocket watches around on gold chains. They looked like they were related somehow to ZZ Top and would start singing “Tube Steak Boogie” as my foot was ground off.
I’d been having this nightmare every Friday night ever since my girlfriend moved in with me, over my objections. I told her bluntly that this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for marriage and that she better learn to cook something beyond grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup.
All of this bullshit prompted me to make an appointment with my therapist. I told her about my wood-chipper nightmare. She asked to think of any childhood experiences with wood chippers. I thought and thought and suddenly it came to me! When I was 9 the creepy man next door, Miles, gave me pencil sharpener. It was silver and crank operated, just like the wood chipper in my nightmare. He would collect dried squished worms off the sidewalk and invite me over with my pencil sharpener to grind up the dried worms! He would sing Joan Baez’s “Joe Hill” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” to me while I ground the worms. When I told Mom what Miles and I did, she had him arrested. He was convicted of corrupting the morals of a child. He didn’t go to jail quietly: he threatened to destroy my pencil sharpener and gruesomely murder me by cutting me into little pieces and feeding me to the squirrels in the park. I threw my pencil sharpener in the trash and started drinking heavily at the age of ten to blot Miles out of my memory.
My therapist gave me an ovation and threw me a couple of Nutella cookies at me. “Now, we need to figure out what’s bringing these memories back in your dreams. If we can bring that motivation to your conscious awareness, most likely they will vanish.” She said this with a level of excitement I’d never seen before.
I thought. I contemplated. I puzzled. Eureka! I got it. My therapist leaned forward to hear what I had to say. I told her how my girlfriend had recently moved in with me. How she was a lovely woman who wanted to please me in every way possible. One of those ways was sexually. When she went down on me she would say “I’m gonna’ sharpen your pencil baby.” Metaphorically referring to my penis as a pencil, and her saying she was going to sharpen it, brought back memories of Miles and his perversity with me and my pencil sharpener. My therapist gave me a standing ovation and handed me what looked like a bottle of fairly decent Shiraz.
Those nightmares went away! But now, I’m having a recurring nightmare where my penis turns into a pencil.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu.
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