Comparatio (com-pa-ra’-ti-o): A general term for a comparison, either as a figure of speech or as an argument. More specific terms are generally employed, such as metaphor, simile, allegory, etc.
Mom: You are like a cracked egg rolling toward the edge of a 200-foot high cliff somewhere in New Mexico. Our certitude of your forthcoming demise robs your rolling trajectory of all suspense, leaving room only for bets on how soon you will shatter on the canyon floor and splash your yolk and egg white all over the jagged rocks, leaving only your shell to bear witness to your fleeting infertile existence, the “offspring” of a captive hen, grunting her life away in the in the confines of a commercial nesting box, only to become after her death, a plastic-wrapped headless roasting chicken on display at Hannaford’s, like an explorer’s boat afloat on a sea of crushed ice looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, the Promised Land, or Atlantic City.
Now, I want you to take what I’ve told you and go out into the world and make something of yourself out of shame and embarrassment. Be like a loaf of bread, tightly sealed, resisting mold. Be yeasty and light to the touch, crumb free and thinly crusted. If you are toasted, go with the flow—the flow of soft butter smeared across your face, or jam, or thick dripping ultra sweet honey. Or be all the sandwich you can be, bearing cold cuts, lettuce, mustard, mayonnaise, cheese, or peanut butter and jelly toward wide-open prospects, eager to have diners gobble up your irresistible sandwiches of comfort and joy. So, take that twisty off your plastic bag and get out there and be a triple decker! Or be a bagel if you want to be!
Daughter: I’m so glad I came to visit. The orderlies are really nice and they escorted me from the front desk. Whenever I visit I see how far into cloud cuckoo land you’ve drifted. I have never been able to follow your advice. It’s like trying use a riddle for a roadmap, or like hooking up with a band of lost lemmings endlessly searching for a cliff, or like a salesperson who has nothing to sell and charges twice what it’s worth.
The closest I have come to following your advice is to be a rag wringer at the laundromat. I have my own corner in the back of the laundromat where I ring out rags, getting them ready to wipe down the washers and driers—keeping them spotless and shiny, like showcases in a jewelry store, countertops at MacDonalds, or toilet seats in rest stops along the NYS Thruway. If anybody should lick a washer or drier, they should have no fear of contracting any orally transmitted diseases. Our machines are as sanitary as Dixie Cups or factory-wrapped toothbrushes.
You’re crazy, so you probably don’t understand a thing I’m saying. It’s ok, We can just sit here and stare at each other for 5-10 minutes. Or maybe, play pattycakes.
Mom: No, no. That’s like asking a bumble bee to give up it’s stripes, or a plumber to pull up his pants, or a trellis to turn away roses, making them crawl along the ground like colorful nicely scented serpents slithering after spiders cowering in the grass, regretting everything they failed to do, as they focused their interest and affection on spinning elaborate webs, flimsy extensions of their self-absorbed egos providing no shelter from the shadow of death lengthening across their pitiful lairs, like a holed-up cowboy preparing to eat lead, or a professional baseball player who knows his team will lose, or a stockbroker riding the DOW into oblivion.
I’m so proud of you. I feel like a million dollars, like I won the LOTTO, or the Indy 500, or I found a wallet on the sidewalk loaded with cash, or I got a hole in one, or I got a ringer in horse shoes, or I shot you in the head with this pistol.
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Mom brandished a handgun. It was fake, and she handed it to the orderly. She had made it in her “Life Skills” class out of balsa wood she was permitted to carve, as long as it was assured she had taken her medication. Allowing patients to use cutting implements was ruled “totally incompetent” by a tribunal and Dr. Iddy was put on one week’s probation.
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Daughter: Mom. You scared to crap out of me. It was like I had stumbled at the edge of a cliff, or Dad had come home, or a rat chased me into the bathroom and I couldn’t get the door unlocked, and it was gnawing at my heel, like I got it stuck in a blender, or I was in an earthquake in some country that didn’t have clean water, or toilet paper, or frisky little squirrels.
Mom: Someday it will all sort itself out, like the keys on a piano, or a blank cartoon sound bubble. Please go home now. I need to cool off so I can make hay while the sun shines, and be a chooser not a looser.
Daughter: Ok Mom. I’ll head home now—it’s where the heart is, like my rib cage, or San Fransisco.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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