Paralipsis

Paralipsis (par-a-lip’-sis): Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of pretending to pass it over (see also cataphasis). A kind of irony.

“He said, standing there in his monogrammed bathrobe: ‘I’m not going to tell you how much I Jove you.‘ With that, he came at me with his tongue sticking out. I was 46 at the time, and I thought I had seen everything. When it was over, I felt guilt for what we had done. But, from then on, men’s tongues excited me. Sometimes I would sit on park bench with my tongue sticking out, waiting for ‘Mr. Right.’ Please help me Reverend Jack.”

I specialize in fetish conversion therapy, trading “The Cross” for “The Fetish.” Ms. Lombardi’s case was difficult, but we helped her overcome her tongue fetish. We filled her tub with cow’s tongues obtained from “Big Bill’s Broadway Butchery.” Bill specialized in weird cuts of meat like pig’s ears and sheep’s ankles.

Ms. Lombardi leapt into the tub yelling “Yahoo!” But after a week of soaking in the tongues, she begged to be hauled out. She screamed “I hate tongues.” She was cured!

We told her that when the tongue-urge hit her in the future, the Lord advised that she turn to glossalalia (speaking in tongues), or licking envelopes, to drive out her urge.

The hardest case we ever had was Mr. X, or “The Man Who Loved Air.” He refused to gasp or hold his breath. He wouldn’t make a wish and blow out his birthday cake’s candles. He wouldn’t go under water in his swimming pool. He slept with a respirator, put in place every night by his private nurse. Whenever he exhaled, he felt guilty for betraying the oxygen he loved by expelling it into the “big and lonely” atmosphere.

As you can see, his love of oxygen, in the last case above, put him in a sort of double bind: if he inhaled, he would have to exhale because “breathing” symbolized the full circle of his love, but it was inevitably snarled in “exhalation regret,” a rare and nearly intractable psychological malady, not unlike that of breaking up.

We prayed on it and the Lord told us he should become a clown—blowing up balloons for children could, itself, be an act of love, ameliorating the conundrum of exhaling/loving. His exhalation would be housed in a balloon releasing it from the cruel anomie of the atmosphere. He was told that the Lord wanted him to carry a handful of balloons at all times, and to blow one up when he felt the anxiety of exhaling. It worked. Just yesterday, he did a “full gasp” when he ran over a groundhog with his car.

I had another successful exorcism under my vestments. Praise the Lord. I am but a vessel for His divine spirit.