Category Archives: epiplexis

Epiplexis (e-pi-plex’-is): Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question [–the speaker does not expect an answer].

I am in hell. I am tortured. I have snapped. I am grief stricken. I’m crying my ass off, like Roy Orbison on steroids. Five boxes of tissues, and one pint of gin —the tears will dry, the pain will ease, but the memories will never, never, never go away.

I found him, dormant on my shoulder at Airport Drayage at SeaTac Airport where I worked loading and unloading airplanes’ perishable freight coming from Hawaii and going to the Alaskan oil fields. “He” had fallen off a box of papayas I was carrying on my shoulder to the cooler. He was dormant from his flight. I put him in a small cardboard box and poked holes in it so he could breathe when he woke up. I was a graduate student at the University of Washington. I took the spider to a faculty member who studies arachnids. He instantly identified the spider as a Cane Spider. The professor told me he was a hunting spider, and, if I was going to keep him I should feed him live crickets that I could get at “Practical Pets” in the U. District. He also warned me that Cane Spiders have a pretty “hefty” bite.

I named the spider Ed. I had an aquarium left over from my tropical fish days. They had all died when some kind of fatal fish plague had infected the fish tank. I bought one dozen crickets and a screen for the top of the fish tank so Ed couldn’t escape. I put a piece of tree branch in the tank for Ed to climb on and hide under.

I had a teaching assistantship and decided to keep Ed in my office. The day had come to transfer Ed from his box to his tank. I was freaking out, trying to figure out how to open the box and dump him without having him escape or being bitten. I could hear him scratching around in the box. I opened the box and turned it upside down over the tank. Ed dashed out of the box and up my arm. I didn’t know what to do. Surely, he would escape, maybe biting me first. Instead, he ran back down my arm and jumped in the tank. He wagged his spider butt and I swear he smiled at me! When I put the screen on he ran around in circles in what I took to be protest. So, I left it off. I bombed him with a few crickets. He broke off their heads, liquified them, and slowly ingested them.

This was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. For example, when I was out of my office, he’d climb up over the doorway and land on my head when I came through the door. I guess he had a sense of humor. He would permit me to put the screen on when I had an appointment with a student. The students loved him.

Christmas break was coming. I considered bringing Ed home for the break, but my wife wouldn’t hear of it. She characterized Ed as creepy, disgusting, frightening, and sneaky. So, I left Ed in my office with a horde of crickets to feed on. He jumped up and down for joy. After three days, I went to my office to check on Ed. He didn’t greet my like he usually did by dropping off the top of the door onto the top of my head. I looked for him on top of the doorway, and there he was, shriveled up dead.

The university had turned off the heat over the break. For some reason, after surviving the flight from Hawaii, the turned off heat in my office had killed him. I wrapped Ed in a piece of paper and lit him on fire out behind the building. I carefully poured Ed’s ashes in the sandwich bag I had packed my lunch in that day.

It was the darkest day of my life. I took Ed’s tank to the dump and smashed it to bits. I took his photo down from my home-office wall. I couldn’t bring myself to scatter or bury his ashes. I would carry them in my pocket for the rest of my life. I discovered “Don Bugito Planet-Friendly Edible Insect Protein Snacks” (Chili-Lime Crickets), and ate a bag every day in memory of Ed.

I will never recover from the loss of Ed. He froze to death over 30 years ago, but I can still feel the tickle of his legs on my head. I reach for him. He’s not there.

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

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Epiplexis (e-pi-plex’-is): Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question [–the speaker does not expect an answer].

How do you think I feel? Do you think I’ll ever recover from Joey’s death? Can I live without him? How can I throw a handful of dirt on his coffin and watch it sink into the ground, buried forever in this decrepit old cemetery?

This is the worst day of my life since I lost my bid for Homecoming Queen to that slut Margaret Pinole. I took diet pills for a month. I had a hairdo like Marie Antonette. I got my gown from “Off the Truck” a well-respected Mafia cut-rate retail store. My gown looked like a puffy white cloud tinted by the setting sun and floating over South Beach, Miami. I lived in Linden, New Jersey, but everybody had relatives retired in Florida. My Aunt Pickle and Uncle Red lived there. Aunt Pickle watched game shows while Uncle Red went fishing. In New Jersey, Uncle Red ran numbers until lotto was legalized. His numbers came from the number of shares sold on the New York Stock Exchange. After the numbers, he had a used car lot. It was called “Stars Cars” and was stocked with “babied mobiles.” He took only cash and would not tell anybody where he got his cars from. One day, Joey asked him and he beat the shit out of him and told him he may “die” if he pushed it.

I think that beating may have hastened Joey’s death. I think when Uncle Red hit him in the head with the rock, it did something to Joey. He wasn’t good at anything after the beating. For example, he used roll-on deodorant and he kept rolling it across his chest. Sometimes, you could see his heart beating through his Banlon shirt. The weirdest was that he couldn’t talk without singing what he was he was saying. He had a beautiful voice. He sounded like Frank Sinatra. Everybody loved his speech. He would say something like “I’m goin’ to the fu*kin’ deli” and it would sound like nightclub act in Vegas. Eventually, he went to work for Western Union doing singing telegrams. That’s how he came to have the affair with Mr. Big Shit’s wife. As soon as I found out she disappeared from the face of the earth and big my brother Orzo cut 2 of Joey’s fingers off. I kept them in a jar over the kitchen sink so stupid-ass Joey wouldn’t forget that what he had done was wrong and there was a price to pay.

I took the jar down when Joey died. He was torched in back of the “Palsy Walsy Pub.” He’d gone outside to take a leak and somebody threw gasoline on him and sent him up. I went looking for him and saw the smoking heap. Then I saw the glint of the giant gold cornicello I had given him as a surprise for being good for 2 months. It was lying by the heap that was Joey. I fell down on the ground screaming and crying. I was out of my mind. They took Joey to the morgue and my brother Orzo drove me home. I put Joey’s cornicello on the kitchen windowsill.

Joey was innocent. He wasn’t mobbed up. He was just a telegram singer. The only thing I can think is he was fooling around with an another woman and a husband found him out. What else could it be? What a shit, but I loved him. When he sang “Cara Mia” I would melt like hot wax dripping down a candle.

A couple days after Joey burned, I got a condolences card from somebody named Sal that I didn’t know. It said: “Sorry about your husband.” I knew it was the killer trying to needle me. The dumb ass had put a return address on the note. A Good Samaritan took care of him. The police found his head on Rte. 9 on the road shoulder somewhere near Elizabeth. Fu*k him.

It turned out he was a rich ass sorry bastard who collected debts for a living. That doesn’t exactly make me want to cry.

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.

Epiplexis (e-pi-plex’-is): Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question [the speaker does not expect an answer].

“Why do I feel so bad? Why have I cried for two days straight?” I did feel bad, but I was lying about the crying. I was talking to my reflection in a mirror, so I should’ve known better. I changed it to “Why did I cry all morning?” That wasn’t true either. What did I expect to get out of lying to myself about my grief? I said “Boo Hoo” to see if that would help—boo hoo is the universal expression of crying. It didn’t get me anywhere.

My mother-in-law, Bobbi, the bane of my existence, was dead. We found her in the bathtub with a plugged-in toaster oven under her head like a pillow. It was set on broil and had blown all the circuit breakers in the house. Bobbi’s bathroom was the last place we checked for a short circuit. She was lying there with her hair smoking and a little smile on her face. There was no sign of struggle. All 265 pounds of her was resting quietly in the bathtub. She looked like a manatee in repose.

I unplugged the toaster oven and called the police. I was fearful of foul play, especially since the toaster oven was tucked under her head like a pillow. Detective Parrot showed up at the door. He looked like a penguin with a mustache. “Where is the body?” He asked in some kind of foreign accent—maybe Massachusetts. I told him where the body was and he took off up the stairs. 20 seconds later he yelled “I have solved the crime. Everybody assemble in the driveway and I will disclose the killer. Hurry!”

My wife and I and Shatzy, the sneaky, disgruntled, dangerous, furtive Home Aide we hired from Clean Hospitals without reading his references, stood waiting for Detective Parrot in the driveway.

Finally he showed up and yelled “None of you are the killer!” We looked at each other, relieved. “The murderer is the Chinese assembly line worker who left the “Do not immerse in water” label from the toaster oven’s underside. After sabotaging 100s of toaster ovens, he moved to the US to reap the rewards. He calls himself Parrot! That’s my name too! I have never met him, ha ha! At that point Parrot turned his walking stick into a sword. He came at the three of us yelling something in Chinese. Because of his penguin gait, he was no match for us as we ran away. We jumped into my Maserati and headed straight for Parrot.

He was toast. I ran over him with a sickening thumpabumpa. My Maserati was injured, but we weren’t.

All three of us stayed on at the manor house, and things returned to normal. One morning, when my wife was taking a bath, I saw Shatzy carrying a toaster oven upstairs. He said he wanted to make English muffins in his room. “What a great idea Shatzy, capital!” I said. I wanted to encourage him to be creative. I went back to playing with my electric trains. I had set a switch so there would be a head-on collision between two trains. I was excited! Then, suddenly the power went out. I called Shatzy but he didn’t answer. I went upstairs and there was my wife with her hair smoking in the bathtub. I went down stairs and there was Shatzy. I handed Shatzy a briefcase with $250,000 in it. We had gotten the idea from Parrot. The English muffin thing was a ruse! Moo-hoo hah, hah, hah. I called the police as Shatzy went out the door, and I practiced being upset in the mirror.

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.

Epiplexis (e-pi-plex’-is): Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question [–the speaker does not expect an answer].

Why am I such a shitty father? I wake up on the floor and you’re already up pouring milk on the kitchen counter, cereal bowl overflowing—what a mess. Just like our lives. When your mother left with her “work out” instructor, you were 2, and it’s been downhill ever since. Why can’t I pull it together? It’s just a matter of time before Child Protection Services comes banging on our door. I’m not crying, but I’m close—close to running out the door wailing and disappearing over the horizon. I didn’t mean that, but I’m heartbroken.

Why can’t I stop sobbing and do something? Why can’t I do the right thing for once? Mama’s still paying for my health insurance. Although it probably won’t work, I am going to try counseling.

First order of business: dump the vodka down the drain and give you a bath. I am so sorry Rusty. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text added by Gorgias.

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