Category Archives: congeries

Congeries (con’ger-eez): Piling up words of differing meaning but for a similar emotional effect [(akin to climax)].

“Ouch! Hell! Stop it!” I was the worst dental patient. I yelled from the chair, letting my pain be known to everybody in earshot. The dentist hated me. He tried everything to make me shut up. Patients would actually leave their appointments due to my cries. He finally resorted to overdosing me on nitrous oxide. No more cries of pain! Now I yelled “Wow man!” Or “Far out!”

I liked nitrous oxide. I got some on the dark web along with the huffing equipment. I sucked it all day. I told my colleagues at work that I had severe asthma. They pitied me having to carry the face mask and canister everywhere. Little did they know how blissful it made me. I would carry my canister up Mt. Everest if I had to.

Then I met Peggy Sue. Her parents had named her after the Buddy Holly song. She was crossed-eyed. But she had beautiful red hair—like a pile of autumn leaves burning on top of her head. I told her about my asthma. It was hard hugging her with my canister in the way. It made kindling a romance difficult. She said it was cold against her chest.

There was no way I was giving up nitrous. I decided to get her addicted. I bought her a canister and face mask. I helped put it on her. I told her it was an instrument of empathy and would make us love each other even more. She took her first puff and she was hooked—she made a little squealing sound that was endearing. When we hugged our tanks clanked together, sounding like wedding bells.

We took the hint and got married. We are high all the time. Our life together is a gas.

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.

Congeries (con’ger-eez): Piling up words of differing meaning but for a similar emotional effect [(akin to climax)].

“Help, murder, police!” This is what my kid yells whenever I try to give him advice. I think it’s a quote from one of Shakespeare’s plays—maybe “Merchant of Venice.” His mother hears him and comes running yelling “What are you doing to my precious baby boy?” “Giving him advice.” I calmly say. She yells, “Stop tormenting him with your sanctimonious bullshit.” I say, “It’s not bullshit—I was telling him he shouldn’t wear his dress shoes to play in the snow—they’ll get ruined and they’re expensive to replace.”

My wife makes it up the stairs. She’s standing in the doorway of our son’s bedroom. She’s wearing her pink terrycloth bathrobe—it looks like a belted bath towel. It has a spot of egg yolk on the collar and a coffee stain further down. She has a mug of coffee in one of hand and a cigarette in the other. She takes a drag off the cigarette and exhales the smoke as she talks: “Look, Arnie, does he look like he needs your crazy-ass advice? So what if he gets in trouble or ruins a pair of friggin’ shoes he never wears? I’m his mother, and I decide what’s good for him.” I looked at her and said: “Like the time you told him to go ahead and make his own fireworks? Now he only has four fingers on his left hand.” She said what she always said she I brought it up: “Arnie, he’s right-handed, who cares?”

Our son Gomer (she had named him) was on his way to hell. Ruining his dress shoes was another step along the way. He knew his mother would override any advice I gave him—just for the sake of having her way. That’s when I decided to take him somewhere his mother couldn’t get into and fill his head with my advice, which I had written down in a diary to give him. It was titled “Don’t Listen to Your Mother.” I took him to the men’s room at a nearby Thruway rest stop. I started giving him advice, secure in the belief his mother wouldn’t enter the men’s room—especially since we had left her at home. He looked at the diary and yelled “Help, murder, police!” I was held in police custody until I could prove I was his father and had no intention of murdering him.

We drove home in silence.

When we got home, it dawned on me! If I gave our son bad advice, my wife would intervene and give him good advice just to spite me. it worked like a charm until one day when my wife was visiting her mother, the first time she’d been out of house in six years. I told Gomer to use his new toothbrush to brush his teeth and if he didn’t like it to “shove it up his ass.” He yelled “help, murder, police,” but his mother wasn’t there to countermand my bad advice. I had really screwed up. I had to drive him to the emergency room to have the toothbrush removed from his ass.

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.

Congeries (con’ger-eez): Piling up words of differing meaning but for a similar emotional effect [(akin to climax)].

Wee haa! Wo hoo! Yody Ho! Yippee! As you can tell, I am relatively elated—making some stock elation sounds, and a couple of new inventions. I am easily elated. An airplane landing elates me. Sunshine on my shoulders elates me. A chicken crossing the road would push me over the edge without asking why. I would just watch, and then break out in joyous noises when the chicken reaches the other side.

There are so many goals to be achieved in life that are not extraordinary but yet help make the world go around. Think of the humble nitwit. Consider how they must contemplate the steps in a process and diligently strive to complete it without causing too much damage, but nevertheless be yelled at by an angry boss.

Once one becomes an avowed nitwit, life’s burdens build into mountains of incompetence topped with grief and anger. For example, what about the guy whose job was to scrape gum off the floor at the Notting Hill Tube Station in London. People would walk by and kick them, pretend he was a horse because he worked on his hands and knees, and rode horsey on his back while he scraped. They would also swat his butt with “The Evening Standard.” He stood up, posing like the Statue of Liberty—holding his scraper up like Lady Liberty’s torch. One of his knee pads slipped down his leg and all the commuters stopped and fell silent.

Collectively, they could see what they couldn’t see individually. There was a doctor from Vienna standing by the stairs holding his arms in a circle. He was holding a pastie in one hand and chewing a bite from it very slowly while the wheels spun in his head. They were snow tires and unsuited to London’s summer. He tried revving them up while he contemplated the crowed. He hoped to wear the treads off on the rough edges of his skull’s interior. He dropped his briefcase. It startled him and provided a road to revelation: collectively the commuters came to conensus without saying a word. This must mean when people are packed together they think alike. The have a “collective” consciousness. They are like ants or honeybees, or flying geese or schools of fish.

The gum scraper lowered their scraper and pulled up their knee pad. The commuters became animated again and headed down to the tube platform. The sun came out behind the doctor’s back and he forgot everything, picking up his briefcase and blending in with the commuters. He kicked the gum scraper as he went past and felt very good after doing so.

He was a fake. He wore a second-hand sports coat and pretended to be a doctor. He had a fake office and receptionist. He spoke with a fake Austrian accent, that was actually German and had learned from Colonel Klink on “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Life is complicated.

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.