Category Archives: anamnesis

Anamnesis (an’-am-nee’-sis): Calling to memory past matters. More specifically, citing a past author [apparently] from memory. Anamnesis helps to establish ethos [credibility], since it conveys the idea that the speaker is knowledgeable of the received wisdom from the past.

As the ancient Greek Potacles said, “In-between is the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end.” My mother shared these words of wisdom when she would throw the book she was reading onto the floor and dump her full ashtray on top of it. The ashes made an aesthetically pleasing grey cloud that was accented by her filter-tipped smokes. She would make me clean up the mess. I would cull out a couple of the longer butts and go out in the garage and smoke them. They had Mom’s lipstick on them. When I smoked them, I imagined I was kissing Mom. It was a perverse pleasure—nicotine plus the taste of Mom’s lipstick. I didn’t care. I didn’t want it to end. I stuck the cigarettes in my mouth greedily, with my eyes closed passionately twirling the lipstick-coated butts around between my lips. One day I put four butts at once between my lips. It was overwhelming. I fainted and fell to the garage floor.

When I awoke, I was laying on my back in an ambulance with Mom holding my hand and praying for God to let me live. As we rode along, I told Mom what I had been up to. She told me I was disgusting and told the orderly to let her out of the ambulance on the corner of Chestnut Street. I was bereft. My soul had been torn out. I wet my pants.

My mother had me incarcerated in “Son of Sam.” It was named after a famous serial killer. It was a “hospital” specializing in “depervification.” I was a certified pervert. SOS was perfect for me.

My therapy consisted of the same regime every day. First, they would stick lipstick-saturated cigarette butts up my nostrils. Then, they tickled my nose with a pubic hair until I sneezed and the cigarette butts shot out of my nostrils, landing in a bowl of kerosene where they were lit on fire and destroyed. This triggered something deep inside of me. It was intense self-disdain, and anger, and regret. The procedure awakened my better angel that had been sleeping on the feather bed of my moral neglect. He was confirming my new desire, holding aloft a black walnut—one of the toughest nuts to crack. But now, I wanted to torture small animals and I said so. My better angel disappeared in a puff of red smoke. I faked being cured by throwing up over and over and yelling “I’m sick.” It worked.

I checked out of SOS and booked an Uber to the pet store at the mall, “All Creatures Creep and Crawl.” I purchased 3 hamsters and headed home to dismember them and shove them down the garbage disposal. I was back on the perv train, destination total horror!

Mom was a thing of the past.

POSTSCRIPT

The perv was detained in a raid by ICE on his apartment complex. ICE found a chipmunk head in his jacket pocket along with a half-dozen rodent feet. His home was searched, uncovering unspeakably cruel and abusive horrors. He was sentenced to 300 years in prison, and rightfully so.

In a gruesome reprise, there are currently 3 copycats operating in the TRI-State area. We beg them to cease and desist. We know all of you have been circumcised and may be suffering from Bi-Polar “Circumcisional Mushroom Pecker Syndrome.” RFK JR. has assured us that his diagnosis of your condition is infallibly based on his “ironclad opinion” as a part of his crusade to ban circumcision. He can heal you with a quick surgical procedure., making your dick look like a banana again.

Turn yourselves in! Stop the carnage!

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

The Daily Trope is available in an early edition on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Anamnesis (an’-am-nee’-sis): Calling to memory past matters. More specifically, citing a past author [apparently] from memory. Anamnesis helps to establish ethos [credibility], since it conveys the idea that the speaker is knowledgeable of the received wisdom from the past.

As Rumpelstiltskin asked, “What’s my name Baby?” I was looking in the mirror preparing for my big move. I had been stalking this woman for about 3 months. I didn’t have anything better to do. I’m an unemployed stockbroker. My 401k is keeping me alive. I had earned the nickname “Tank” because everything I invested in for my clients “tanked.” I thought it was funny at first. That is, until it kept happening and happening. I lost the firm 2mil, then, they told me goodbye. I didn’t go quietly. I did a month in jail (with early release) for beating up my boss and trying to throw him out a second-story window, starting a trash fire on my desk, and throwing my stapler through one of the plasma monitors displaying the Dow.

As a condition of my early release, I had to attend anger management classes at “Featherdown,” a night “school” that makes a lot of money from the state, and deals exclusively in short-fused, belligerent, violent offenders.

On my first night, I brushed past a woman as I was going through the door. She pulled a knife, kicked me in the crotch an yelled “Don’t move you perverted asshole. What do I look like, your fu*king mother?” She was quickly frog-marched to her seat by two of the class monitors.

My favorite exercise was “Dipshit.” Facing your partner from two inches away, you yell “dipshit” in their face over and over until one you hits the other or pushes them away. Eventually, you look forward to being called dipshit, and you enjoy it. Then, you move on to the next exercise. Eventually, if everything goes well, you like being abused and you don’t get angry anymore.

The final exam consists of an atomic wedgy. You are given a loaded .45 and hung up by your underpants and taunted by your fellow classmates. If you don’t shoot anybody, you are designated “in control” and a “Certified Anger Manager.”

I found out after the exam that the .45 was loaded with blanks. That made me really angry. But, I was a “Certified Anger Manager” so I calmed down pretty fast.

The woman I was stalking ducked into a bar. I went in and sat down on the stool next to her at the bar. When I got close to her I could see that she was the woman I’d brushed up against my first night of anger management classes. I said “What’s my name Baby?” I expected to be knifed, but she laughed and said “Tank. I know you from Featherdown. You probably don’t remember me, but my name’s Rusty for my red hair.”

Success! We talked and drank. Drank and talked. I ended up at Rusty’s apartment. After awhile Rusty said we had talked enough and it was time to do something else. She wanted to make some scrambled eggs for an early breakfast.

I was looking for the eggs in the refrigerator when she came up behind me and yelled “Who do you think you are?” and hit me on the head with a frying pan. I said, “Quick! Let’s do the Dipshit!” We positioned ourselves and started yelling “dipshit” in each other’s faces. Rusty quickly regained her composure.

I got out of there as quickly as possible and went to urgent care for an x-ray. The next day, Rusty called me and apologized. We made a date to meet at “Slasher’s Steak House.”

POSTSCRIPT

Rusty had an anger attack at Slasher’s. Tank had taken the precaution of making sure her place was set with plastic tableware.

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

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Anamnesis (an’-am-nee’-sis): Calling to memory past matters. More specifically, citing a past author [apparently] from memory. Anamnesis helps to establish ethos [credibility], since it conveys the idea that the speaker is knowledgeable of the received wisdom from the past.

When I was a kid, I didn’t whine about walking 2 miles to school through 4 feet of snow, with drifts 8 feet high. I was too poor to afford mittens so I wore socks on my hands. Although he didn’t like it, I strapped cat to my head to keep my ears warm. My winter coat was a yellow raincoat lined with Sunday newspapers. I had normal pants, but they were too big. The cuffs dragged in the snow, coating them with heavy snow bergs. I wore my grandfather’s goulashes. He was dead, but his goulashes had done him well. They were lovingly patched. He was walking the mile to Cliff’s when he died. His foot got stuck in a crack in the sidewalk. Nobody helped him and he froze to death. He had gone to Cliff’s te get a package of Jolly Ranchers and a quart of holiday egg nog. But anyway, I inherited his goulashes and I am taking good care of them.

If you would read “Blizzard” by Bucky Bells, you’d have a vivid sense of what I’m talking about—I know what I said above is pretty scary, but yet, I quote from memory: “You could smell the Yeti the minute you went out the door. Yesterday, it had eaten Joey, my neighbor friend. There were blood and bones all over the sidewalk and Joey’s red knitted hat was hanging from a tree stained with blood. I had started carrying an axe to school to fight off the Yeti if I had to. The day he attacked me, I chopped off his arm and he ran away screaming.”

I never personally met the Yeti on my way to school, but I did smell him. He smelled like the homeless man who lived in the bushes outside the entrance to the middle school. His name was Ned and he was an ex-convict. He had been jailed for selling counterfeit Barbie dolls on the village square. It was a scandal. Ned came from a prominent family that had a tremendously successful greeting card business. Accordingly, when Ned was convicted, he received cards taunting him, like “Congratulations,” and “You worked Hard. You deserve it.”

So anyhow, with global warming, you won’t have to endure what I endured—maybe a dusting of snow or a sparkly frost is all you have to deal with. You could survive a week in Antarctica in your hooded goose down suits and heated boots. Walking to school in winter no longer builds character. You might as well take a cab for all the good it does you.

Don’t ask me for cab fare.

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

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.