Category Archives: tmesis

Tmesis (tmee’-sis): Interjecting a word or phrase between parts of a compound word or between syllables of a word.

The strawberry ice friggin’ cream was Humpty bumpy Dumpty good. Maybe it fell off the wall! Maybe it had a great fall! It made my mouth drool. It could’ve been a sandwich, but it wasn’t. It could’ve been a cheeseburger. But it wasn’t. It was me thinking crazy thoughts, sitting by the window in my white room with blue curtains. There was an electrified fence encircling “Happy Niche” the big granite manor house that been converted to accommodate people like me—a pants-shitting howling psychopath who composed songs and tried to escape every three days, like clockwork.

My latest song was about a man who had decapitated his mother with the intention of eating her. Just as he was going to take a bite out of her thigh, the police showed up with a big net—like a giant butterfly net—and netted him. He shit his pants to try and fend them off, but they were wearing nose plugs. They moved in and netted him. The son’s refrain was “I want to eat my mother’s thigh, on rye, in the sky, bye, bye.” It makes me sob. It’s like the folk song “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley,” or “Fire and Rain.” The title of the song is “Yummy Mummy Dear.” I performed it at the “Happy Niche” talent show. I was booed during my entire performance and was beat up in the men’s room afterwards by a gang of five schizos and one bi-polar monster who stuck my head in a toilet, flushed it over and over, and spanked me.

Now, I really want today’s escape attempt to succeed! I have wrapped myself in toilet paper to mimic the white clothing the orderlies wear. I will boldly walk down the hallway to the exit door. If I am stopped, I will say I’m going outside for a cigarette. I have a cigarette prop that I paid fifty dollars for—it is a “Lucky Strike.”

I took two steps out of my door and an orderly asked me “What the hell are you doing?” I held up my cigarette and told him I was going outside for a smoke with the other orderlies. He took my cigarette away and told me to get back in my room or he would kill me.

Busted again! Un-fu*king real!

I am doomed to live my life out as an inmate in “Happy Niche.” I’m just going to shit my pants and go watch TV. Dean Martin reruns are on.

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.

Tmesis (tmee’-sis): Interjecting a word or phrase between parts of a compound word or between syllables of a word.

“Oat-shit-meal.” That’s what I called it as soon as I learned to swear. Every morning, oatmeal. Every morning prepared the same way: plain. No sugar. No Half & Half. No fruit. No nothing. Just the steaming brown glop in a small metal dog dish. Yes, dog dish! My mother got it at the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It was imprinted with bones around the rim and I could annoy my mother by tapping my spoon on it.

It was like having hot ground boiled watery cardboard for breakfast every morning. And then there was lunch.

My mother put the leftover oatmeal in small shallow Tupperware containers and refrigerated them. The oatmeal would take on the consistency of refrigerated meatloaf. Mom would slice the refrigerated oatmeal into 1/4 inch thick squares. These were our special cold cuts. She would put one on a slice of bread, top it with a slice of American cheese, and slap another slice of bread on top. Unsurprisingly, she called them “Oatmeal Sandwiches.” She had submitted her “recipe” for her sandwiches to numerous food-oriented magazines and was rejected every time. That did not deter her—we had Oatmeal Sandwiches every day for lunch.

Mom saved Quaker Oats containers. She decorated them and sold them as tom-toms on the web. She would dip them in different-colored paint and decorate them with painted macaroni, seashells, pumpkin seeds, leaves and scraps of different-colored cloth.

Her web-shop was called “Dead Drummer Girl.” We thought she would never sell a single tom-tom, especially with the name of the shop. But we were wrong.

Punk Rock was making its debut. The first band to buy one of her tom-tom’s was the highly innovative punk band “Santa’s Wanker.” Mom’s tom-toms became ragingly popular. After Johnny Balls puked on the stage he would roll around in it playing the tom-tom in a ten-minute solo that was characterized as “shocking.” Santa’s Wanker was killed in a dumpster fire, but that did not slow things down. If anything, it caused a surge in sales. All the great punk bands had to have a tom-tom from Dead Drummer Girl.

Mom started selling the tom-toms for $2,000 each. She made millions before she quit. She quit when Iggy Stool did “something too weird” with one of her tom-tom’s. It didn’t happen on stage. We’ll never know. Mom disavowed any relationship to oatmeal. Our lives changed considerably, and we started going to IHOP for breakfast and Shogun Sushi for dinner,

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.