Category Archives: syntheton

Syntheton (sin’-the-ton): When by convention two words are joined by a conjunction for emphasis.

I live somewhere between heaven and hell, New Jersey and Oklahoma, and hook, line and sinker: a trifecta of woe. There is a cloud continuously hovering over my head. It rains on my parade and strikes me with lightening illuminating my inhumanity. I have two arms, two legs, a body and a head that talks, but I fall short of being human.

I have no empathy. I am missing the feeling in my gut that most people get when they witness horror with a human cost—a teenage girl impaled on a tree branch after being hurled from her boyfriend’s pickup truck, moaning with pain in her final moments—bleeding, dying five feet away from where you stand in shock. This is an experience that will haunt you with inner tumult for the rest of your life—with the empathy embedded in your gut. Medication and counseling will help you deal with your PTSD. But me? Nothing.

Or, what about the time I saw a mother (a friend of mine) yelling at her toddler—a little being barely able to understand language. She was blaming the child for her losses at the horse track where we were. She was shaking the child. So far, she had bet on four races and lost them all. She had smuggled the child into the track in her oversized purse. I didn’t care, and didn’t care that I didn’t care.

The child’s name was Marlon and there was a horse named Brando running in the next race: Marlon Brando—it had to be a winner. She hadn’t bet on a winning horse for years—they all lost. At Gamblers Anonymous she had been encouraged to stay away from the track—it was poison to her. She didn’t care. She headed for the betting window with every cent she had. She bet it on Brando and waited for the race to begin. She lost everything. Brando ran last. I felt nothing—it was almost as if nothing had happened. Nothing.

She was crying and banging her head on the track’s rail. Her forehead was bleeding. I felt nothing standing there holding her smuggled child’s hand. “Take the little f*ck!” she yelled as she climbed the pole at the finish line. She reached the top and jumped and smashed her head. The EMT said she died instantly. I felt nothing. I left the child there alone, but I had second thoughts and went back. He was standing right where I left him. I wrote out a note that said “His mother is dead” and taped it to his forehead with a piece of the duct tape I keep in my car’s glove compartment. I drove him to his grandmother’s, rang the doorbell, and ran back to my car. I didn’t want to get involved. I felt that was an improvement over feeling nothing.

I was becoming human.

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

The Daily Trope is available in an early edition 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.

Syntheton (sin’-the-ton): When by convention two words are joined by a conjunction for emphasis.

Death and taxes, life’s two certainties. But who cares? I specialize in uncertainty, experiencing it and cultivating it. I revel in anxiety—mine and yours. I am a “Worry Wart.” I help free people from the trap of certitude—that bleak unchanging mental place, where you’re stuck in the grip of truth—always, everywhere the same. Blah, blah, blah.

Certainty is like a lump of coal in your stocking on Christmas morning. Santa pulls no punches, so you know you’re naughty. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. That’s it. No room for improvement. No chance for redemption. You think “naughty” is the truth, but it isn’t. A Worry Wart can encompass this “truth” growing over it and masking its effect—it can throb with questions pounding away at the “truth.” What if Santa didn’t put the lump of coal in your stocking? What if Santa put the lump of coal in your stocking by mistake? What if there is no such thing as Santa? Good God!

There is this sweet anxiety prompted by the questions above. You worry. The space between the questions prompts anxiety as you wonder about the accuracy of the naughty-imputation signified by the lump of coal. Where should you turn? What should you believe? The foundation of your self concept has been shaken. The “truth” of the coal’s “naughty” projection has been shattered into shards, which, at best, now construe the possible. But the shards would have to be put back together again. It is uncomfortable. It is disconcerting. It is probably impossible.

Now, you try being nice. It is a choice. “Nice” takes a sort of competence imbued by practice. But you realize that being naughty works the same way. You must desire to be nice. You must desire to be naughty. And what is more disconcerting—you can be naughty and nice. Not at the same time, though. Now you are really provoked! Where does the “wanting” come from? The same place everything else comes from.

Human nature! The womb of human nurture: the social matrix that gives birth to character and cultivates its changes prompted by experience caught in worry, flowing inexorably toward the unknowable future.

POSTSCRIPT

Worry Wart has done it again! Functional anxiety will set you free.

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.

Syntheton (sin’-the-ton): When by convention two words are joined by a conjunction for emphasis.

“Good and plenty. Plenty good.” “Big and tall.” It’s all the same. It’s always the same: more, more, more. More is good until you get more frostbite or crap clogging up your toilet. It is the same old thing. You have to ask more of what? more plague? More famine? More worms in your belly? When I was a kid I kept asking for more ice cream. My parents gave it to me to shut me up. By the time I was four, I weighed 300 pounds. I was too big for a stroller, so my parents took me to the mall in a wheelbarrow. It was uncomfortable, but I liked going out. If there was something I really wanted, I would rock my wheelbarrow back and forth. Sometimes my father would get angry and flip me out of the wheelbarrow. He didn’t do that very often because he would have to get three or four people to hoist me back in my wheelbarrow. After Dad flipped me out one time, I rolled to the escalator, bounced down and got my pants caught. They had to shut down the escalator while the 911 rescue team freed me. I peed my pants and was very embarrassed.

Eventually, my parents sent me to a fat camp outside Pueblo, Mexico: “Hungry Dawn.” I was 18 so they thought I could handle it. First of all, the camp staff spoke only Spanish—the name of the camp was the only thing in English. They didn’t care that I could not understand anything they said. For example, when they said “si” I would start looking around for what I was supposed to see. They would laugh and go “Si, si, si” and point all over. But, with diet and exercise, I lost 150 pounds. I subsisted on water and lizards I pulled off the walls. The people running the camp were deeply impressed with my lizard-catching skills and would roast them for me. In crafts time, I made key rings out of the lizard’s skin and sold them to tourists who came to see the Aztec pyramids. I sold them for $10.00 each and made enough money to bribe my way out of “Hungry Dawn.”

I took a bus to Mexico City, and then flew home to Scranton, PA. I got home around 2:00 am. The front door was locked, so I knocked on it. Some big guy in his underwear pointed a shotgun at me and asked what the hell I wanted. I checked the address—it was the right address. My parents had abandoned me. I apologized and took an Uber to the homeless shelter. The driver told me she had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed somebody to fill in. I told her I would be happy to substitute for him. She asked me if there was anything I needed from Cliff’s. “Yes,” I said, “3 or 4 gallons of ‘Carmel Curl’ ice cream.“

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.