Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence. Synonym for palilogia.
Move! Move! Move! It should’ve been Moo! Moo! Moo! We were being pushed around like a herd of rebellious cows. I got stuck in the middle of this crowd while I was on my way to work. The handle had come lose on my briefcase and I stopped to look at it it and I was engulfed. I didn’t know where I was going—I was like a piece of flotsam. I looked at the guy next to me. He was wearing a cowboy hat. I counted six earrings swinging from his ear. He was wearing one one those sleeveless t-shirts. He had a black circle tattooed on his upper arm.
“Where are we going?” I asked politely. He turned his head and looked at me. He had another black circle tattooed between his eyes. He said “We’re going, going, just going until we are gone. They will throw us bottled water and roast beef sandwiches while we are on our way.” “How do I get out of this mess.” I asked. He said, “When we get THERE. And, by the way, it isn’t a mess, it’s a ritual celebrating The Herd Instinct.” “What?” “The fu*king herd instinct, loser! Why don’t you just lie down and get trampled, numnuts?”
At that point, a marching band started playing the theme song from “Rawhide” a cowboy show popular in the late sixties: “Roll ‘em, roll ‘em, roll ‘em. Keep those dogies roll’in, though the creeks are swollen. Rawhide. Move ‘em up, head ‘em out, Rawhide!” I couldn’t believe I was somewhere in Chicago being propelled along by at least 1,000 lunatics. Right then, I got hit in the head by one of the Roy Rogers roast beef sandwiches the “Trail Bosses” were throwing at us. Yes—they were “Trail Bosses” the guy alongside told me as he managed to catch a sandwich. Subsequently, I was hit in the head by a small bottled water. Then, the marching band started playing “Night Herding.” The guy next to me told me it was an old cowboy song: “I’ve cross-herded, circle-herded, trail-herded too, But to keep you together, that’s what I can’t do, Bunch up, little dogies, bunch up.” When they got to “bunch up,” everybody stopped and rubbed their hips up against each other, and then kept going. The guy next to me told me we were almost THERE. Although they had been closed for years, I could smell the famed Chicago Union Stock Yards.
This was totally surreal. I was a successful businessman. In my head, I was chastising myself for not taking a cab that morning—why was I so damn cheap? Maybe it wasn’t me anyway. Maybe I had died and been reincarnated as a cow that looked like a person. I was freaked out through the roof. The smell of the stockyards got stronger. The guy next to me said, “We are THERE.” The herd stopped. My heart almost stopped too. A man with a Bull Horn, sculpted like a bull’s horn, climbed a fifteen-foot step ladder in front of stock yards’ gate—all that remained of Chicago’s once vibrant meatpacking industry. While the ghosts of millions of doomed cows mooed softly in the background, he addressed the crowd. Herdmaster “Gristle” Jones put a bull’s horn to his lips and yelled: “Welcome fellow Herdites to our 300th annual Roundup, where we give thanks to our cow brethren for their enduring commitment to being herded, for our sake, to their final destination to be transformed into the red meat that we adore, and that sustains us as hamburgers, Porterhouse steaks, T-Bone steaks, all-beef hotdogs, and other delicious sliced, sawed, and chopped-off parts of their gutted, decapitated, skinned, and refrigerated bodies.”
The Herdmaster hoisted a T-Bone steak high in the air and the band struck up another sing-along: Eddie Arnold’s “Cattle Call”: “The cattle are prowlin’ the coyotes are howlin’, Out with the doggies bawl. Where spurs are jinglin’ a cowboy is singin’, This lonesome cattle call [moan].” Everybody moaned for about five minutes. Imagine 1,000 people having an orgasm all at once. That’s what it sounded like.
The Herdmaster climbed down from the ladder and everybody disbursed. There were booths set up selling Herdite-related products like meat cleavers, grills, meat grinders, skewers, seasonings, and aprons with humorous sayings like “Let’s Meat At My Place.” The Herdmaster was selling and signing his book “Cold Cuts.” I heard it was about a man so full of baloney that he turned into a submarine sandwich. It sounded pretty stupid to me. Anyway, he was wearing a mu-mu. Under the circumstances, I thought that was really funny.
As I walked back home, I decided to call in sick—no work today. I stopped at Mr. Squeaky’s Butcher Shop and bought a 1/2 pound of ground beef, almost without thinking. I took a shower and sat down to think. I asked myself, “John, what the hell happened to you today?” I Googled “Herdite” and found nothing. I made a big beef patty, fried it up, and ate it with my hands without a bun or ketchup. I felt my herd instinct rising. I got dressed and took a cab to “Cuddles” which was always jam-packed on Saturday night—shoulder to shoulder, dancing, drinking, sweating. When I went there in the past, I felt like a sardine in a tin, but tonight, I felt like a cow in a herd, and I liked it.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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