Apodixis (a-po-dix’-is): Proving a statement by referring to common knowledge or general experience.
“This blister on my heel is the result clog dancing with my clog dancing club the “Free Form Floor Bangers.” She said it was “only common sense” to come to the conclusion she did. She’s been clog dancing since she was 3. She was 46 now. You’d think with all those years of floor banging, she’d have the right answer about her heel’s blister. But she didn’t. It was her 18-year-old son.
He resented her almost constant clog dancing. She’d clog dance into the living room. She’d clog dance to the kitchen. She’d even clog dance to the car to drive him to school. He was deeply embarrassed when then went grocery shopping and she would clog dance up and down the aisles handing him things to put in their shopping cart. Things came to head when she showed up at the door with a little named Riley. He was smoking a clay pipe and his clogs had huge brass buckles. They went upstairs to Mom’s room and “clogged” for a half-hour. There was no music—just the squeaking of the bed. After they were through, Riley came down the stairs buttoning his pants. As he went out the door he leered and said “She’s me pot ‘o gold, son.”
That’s when he decided enough was enough. He put on an ice skate to stomp on her toes and cut them off, and end her clog dance days forever. But, he slipped on the stairs and spent 2 months in the hospital. When his mother visited him, she would clog dance into his room. She couldn’t understand why he threw his bedpan at her and told her to stop visiting.
So, she hired their next door neighbor’s daughter Flourine to visit him. She had just turned 20 and was hyper-aware of her beauty—she was like Venus with arms. The son, Mort, was aware of it too. She would sit on the side of his bed and twirl her fingers in his hair. It drove him crazy and he vowed to make her his girlfriend when he got out of the hospital.
The day came.
Due to his fall, they had had to take a 2” section out of his left leg. Needless to say, he had a severe limp. Flourine dropped him like a hot potato, or more like a crushed up Kleenex into a trashcan. He was devastated and angry too. That’s why, in his feeble mind, he decided to “go after” his mother and try again to put an end to her clog dancing once and for all.
That’s when he put the tiny pebble in her clog. It gave her the blister that stopped her clog dancing. But he knew it was only temporary. The blister would heal and she’d be back at it again—endless clog dancing from hell. Then, he got the idea to “prune” her—to trim off one of her feet. He had a set of battery-powered pruners that his father had left behind when abandoned the family. He decided to “harvest” her left foot because she always said she had two of them—he’d leave a spare—ha ha.
That night, she told him she was giving up clog dancing! He was filled with joy. She was getting too old to dance in a line with 12-14-year-olds at fairs and on St. Patrick’s Day. But what was worse, the blister on her heel had caused “complications” that affected her clogging capacities in a negative way—causing excruciating pain and vomiting whenever she danced.
Her pain and vomiting was the best news he had ever had! However, every once-in-awhile he would hear her crying out in pain and vomiting late at night down in the kitchen. It was so infrequent that he was able to ignore it.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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