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Effictio

Posted on January 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

It wasn’t my birthday, but I looked 75–almost 80, almost alive. I could walk. I could talk. My bodily functions still function, but slowly with difficulty. I still had all my hair—no receding hairline—a big white cloud on top of my head. When I get it cut, it’s like it’s snowing inside Supercuts. .

I was once a whopping 6’4”. I don’t know how or why, but now I’m 6’2”. Still pretty good, but I’m no longer a tower. Now, I’m like a shed with boobs. They jiggle. My tattoos are blurring. I have one on each forearm that I can’t read any more—one refers to the Army, the other is my personal motto: “Veritas pro se non loquitur” “Truth does not speak for itself.” Due to an injury sustained in the Army, my hearing just gets worse and worse every year. My answer to most questions is “What?” even though I’ve got state of the art hearing aids from the VA that I am grateful for.

Moving right along, I’m relatively wrinkle free— my face looks 35-40. I swear. I’m not exactly trim, but I’m still in pretty good shape and go for walks in the woods. Even though I have bright hazel eyes, that go between blue and green depending on what I wear, lately, they don’t see too well. I have double vision all the time—I have black-rimmed corrective glasses that help somewhat, but I can’t get around the mild vertigo induced by the double vision. It slows me down when I’m walking, and going up and down stairs. The topper is my dupuytren’s contracture—making what looks like a claw of my left hand.

You’d think I would be upset by my body’s aging, but many years ago when I was traveling in Peru, in a cave near Machu Picchu, I was shown a silver mirror that erases the effects of aging and reflects you as you were at 22. It was like a reverse Dorian Gray portrait. I visit it once a year. As long as I don’t see my true reflection during the intervening time, I experience myself as 22. Miraculously, my body functions like that of a 22-year-old, I have stamina, my vision is restored’ I can hear a pin drop, and my hand can be laid out flat. tomorrow, I’m headed out on my annual trek to the mirror.

I arrived in Lima early in the morning and took the tour bus to Machu Picchu. I started my hike to the cave containing the mirror. It was ten miles up a narrow trail. As I walked, I marveled at how the cave had remained hidden. I arrived at the cave.

My guide from previous years lay dead outside the cave’s entrance. He had started to mummify in the dry mountain air. I dragged him into the cave’s entrance, so his body wouldn’t draw unwanted attention. I went looking for the mirror and found it! I presented myself to it, and the 22-year-old me was reflected. I was relieved and started to leave the cave. Suddenly, there was a loud rumbling sound and a landslide blocked the way out of the cave. There was no cellphone reception. So, I got my journal out of my backpack, lit a candle, and started to write. If you’re reading this, you’ve found the mirror. Good luck.

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

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Effictio

Posted on May 30, 2022 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

She was striking— trying to get a match lit to light her hand-rolled cigarette— but she was striking in many other ways. Her hair was almost black and strewn with auburn highlights. When she shook her hair it was like living tinsel, shimmering everywhere on her head. It was perfect. It was thrilling. It was grounds for being captivated, like the first time I noticed my mother’s diamond ring when I was a small child. Whenever she moved her hand a magical light was produced making a bottomless play of colors, coming out of, and disappearing into her ring.

And eyes—a unique color blue that God must’ve chosen to go with Adele’s hair. And mouth—vivid red bows fronting teeth so straight and white they could be mistaken for hand-carved ivory.

With Adele, it was about more than her hair—it was about her face: a perfect circle of tanned skin with a little nose so lovely that it made me understand that there’s beauty in breathing—the pert air channel letting in and letting out life’s breath, set in the middle of her face, accenting the will to live that breathing actualizes, as our lungs are filled and emptied, and we move on.

There’s so much more, but I’ve got to go pick up Adele for our fifth date. I wish she would laugh at my jokes, but she just waves her hand in front of her face.

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

Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There is also a Kindle edition available for $5.99.

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Effictio

Posted on October 2, 2021 | Comments Off on Effictio

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

His skin was a tribute to Postmodernism—a critique of the grand narratives affording space and surfaces the restrictive positioning of images and linguistic structures, keeping repressive borders intact as if they were mandated by a ‘natural order’ emanating from God.

Mr. Mellon had overcome all that with his body’s free-range tattoos: a Modernist’s nightmare!

Of his 200+ tattoos, he had a frame from “Little House on the Prairie” inked on his chest. In the tat, Charles is inked in, headed to the outhouse with a piece of newspaper in his hand. Alongside the “Little House,” there’s a hammer and sickle from the flag of the now-defunct Soviet Union. Centered on his belly button, there’s a durian fruit with passed-out people lying around dressed like dentists. Tony Soprano and Richard Nixon sit on a cloud on the right side of his neck with the number “9” being carved on it by Albert Einstein wielding a jackhammer.

It would take 100s of pages to describe and catalogue Mr. Mellon’s tattoos. Suffice it to say, from head (a question mark on his nose) to toe (a bleeding cut with stitches), his random tattoos project a sort of “I don’t give a shit” mentality which unfortunately projects a quality of rugged individualism, a keystone of Modernism. However, fortunately, it projects a directionless trajectory: going nowhere, the tattoos display an all-consuming disregard for “normal” and challenge the taken-for-granted preference for everyday life and regimes of truth that unreflectively promulgate it.

Mr. Mellon will be on display in a ventilated glass booth daily at the Notting Hill tube stop from October 5- 9, 1.00-3.00 pm. He will be wearing a spa towel to cover his privates, but the rest of him will be unclothed and on-view as he slowly rotates on a turntable repurposed from a record player manufactured in the late 1960s.

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

Buy a print edition of The Daily Trope! The print edition is entitled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There is also a Kindle edition available for $5.99.

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Effictio

Posted on April 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric (legal argumentation) for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

His dyed blond hair is frozen by hairspray into a combination of a rolling wave and a Dairy Queen. His face and tiny hands are covered with bronzing cream making them look like a too-thick cadaver paint job performed by an angry mortician. His eyes are dull blue like spun aluminum moon hubcaps from the sixties. His mouth looks like a banana, peeled, cut sideways, and dyed with Red Dye 40. His teeth look like stunted piano keys superglued to his gums. His neck has a turkey wattle that swings in the wind. In calm weather it looks like labia. His loosely fitting white golf shirt can’t hide his robust boobs with little man-sized nipples pointing the way to the next faux pas. His watermelon belly is suggestive of an early pregnancy. He has an ass the size of North Carolina. It sticks out at right angles to his back. It actually provides a shelf that nobody dares to set anything on except envelopes filled with cash. His penis has been characterized as a “little mushroom” however there is some controversy over whether it looks more like a little toadstool. Having never seen it myself, I can’t say one way or the other, but I think “mushroom” is probably more accurate, given the source. In any event, “little” is the operative term. Legs and feet are what you would expect: legs like flabby gyros ready for the rotating spit; feet a bone spur museum curated by a crooked doctor from New York: try to find the bone spurs.

All-in-all this man’s appearance is a parody of Charles Atlas, the famous 1960s body builder whose image plagues old men with his tanned bodily perfection; old men who never made the mark.

Who is this man who still longs for the Charles Atlas look–who unsuccessfully uses hair and skin dye to approximate his boyhood hope? Who is unable to do anything below his neck to camouflage his failure? He is the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

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

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu) Buy a print version of The Daily Trope! The print version is titled The Book of Tropes and is available on Amazon for $9.99. There is also a Kindle edition available for $5.99.

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Effictio

Posted on September 30, 2017 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric (legal argumentation) for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

He was around nine feet tall. He had long brown shaggy hair and a reddish beard around one foot long. His eyes were yellow and his teeth were sharply pointed. He had a golden hoop erring in each of his ears. His hands looked like flesh-covered vises. He was wearing a beautiful gray hand-tailored suit and a Brooks Brothers tie with pictures of martinis printed on it. His shoes were brown and made of some kind of reptile skin–most likely alligator–most likely very expensive

It was my first day at work and Mr. Adams was my boss!  I couldn’t wait to start working with him, learning from him, and possibly becoming good friends.

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

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Effictio

Posted on December 11, 2016 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric (legal argumentation) for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

He was lying on his back in a pool of blood in the alleyway between the “Bar of Good Hope” and a hardware store. His head looked like a pumpkin that had been sitting on somebody’s porch steps for a month. It was caved in on both sides–mercilessly crushed by the assailant’s baseball bat, which was lying on the concrete walkway alongside the victim. The victim’s brown eyes had a dull film over them and the victim wasn’t breathing, leaving no doubt that he was dead. I checked his pulse anyway. Dead. Dead as can be.

He was around six feet-three inches tall with sandy blond hair. He was wearing a gold wedding band. In addition, he was wearing red shorts, a black T-shirt, and expensive jogging shoes. He was muscular–broad shoulders and sculpted biceps, flat stomach, and legs that looked like he could out-sprint anybody on the body-recovery team.

He had no identification, so he would be admitted to the morgue as “John Doe.” Perhaps the assailant stole his wallet, but the brutality of the beating, and leaving the murder weapon behind, indicate this was a crime of passion: of anger, of love gone bad, or one of the other seemingly endless motives involved in murder.

Next, we need to figure out who this dead guy is, and then, create a list of suspects, and haul them into the Station for interrogation.

It’s not going to be easy solving this one. But once it hits the press, we may get some leads. Also, we’ll be checking fingerprints.

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

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Effictio

Posted on October 19, 2014 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric (legal argumentation) for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

His head was shaped like an heirloom tomato–sort of elliptical with veined bumps running from front to back on the shaved part where his hair used to be.  His eyes were covered with a strip of spray-painted cardboard: flat red with little peepholes poked in it so he could see. His ears were pinned back like left and right side mirrors on a car ready to go through a car wash.   His neck looked like a scuffed traffic cone perched on his shoulders which were slumped and narrow like the back of a bentwood chair. His arms were fat fire hoses swinging as he walked toward me, clutching a big blue bucket with skinny little baby hotdog fingers accented by filthy fingernails.

His black t-shirt said in big bright-green letters: “Repent Or I will Pull Down My Pants.” His “pants” were two trash bags stapled to his T-shirt.

I was thinking “How’s he going to pull his pants down without ripping his T-shirt?”

I felt a shiver in my spine.

“Oh my God, it’s dad in his annual ‘surprise’ Halloween costume!”

I picked up a rock from the gutter and considered throwing it at him. Instead, I put it in his bucket.

“You may need this when the kids over on 85th street chase you like they did last year.”

“Do you remember, Dad?”

He looked at me with his cardboard-covered eyes and blew a tenor fart that slowly faded into the sound of a doleful tuba.

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

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Effictio

Posted on May 6, 2013 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric (legal argumentation) for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

His head was almost perfectly oval–like a giant egg with a face and hair. His ears stuck way out from each side of his head.  If he could wiggle them real fast, he could fly. His shoulders were perpendicular to the ground and his arms looked like bowling pins with hands. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Makin’ Bacon” with a picture on the front of two pigs making piglets.

His pants were so low-slung that you could see his fruits of the loom flashing in the sunlight as he crossed the street–jaywalking his way toward me, clumping along in a pair of moon boots, circa 1983.

“My God!” I thought,  “It’s the guy I bought the used car from that exploded on my way to the senior prom back in ’85!”

I picked up a rock from the gutter and threw it at him.

Revenge is sweet.

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

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Effictio

Posted on January 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Effictio (ef-fik’-ti-o): A verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe.

Note: This figure was used in forensic rhetoric for purposes of clearly identifying an alleged criminal. It has often been adapted to poetical uses.

He had spiky yellow-gray hair with a red stripe running through it. His big blue eyes were bloodshot.  He was skinny, slumped, and dressed in a black t-shirt with a big leering skull on it, torn blue jeans, and dull black boots. He had an empty styrofoam cup in his shaking hand. He pushed it at me as I walked toward him.”Spare change?”

His scratchy voice sounded familiar.

Unbelievable! My best buddy from high school–class of 1998!  He didn’t recognize me. I barely recognized him. He looked right through me. I hauled out my wallet and . . .

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

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