Category Archives: tricolon

Tricolon (tri-co-lon): Three parallel elements of the same length occurring together in a series.

I was cold. I was hungry. I was snide. I think I was cold and hungry because I was snide. I was banned from the Salvation Army thrift store because of what I said to one of the employees. I said “It’s gonna take an army to save you—maybe more than an army! You should be a POW in the war on titanic losers.”

I thought I was being funny with a little Salvation Army humor. The employee didn’t agree. She tried to gouge out my eye with a coat hanger. She failed and I was banned. I couldn’t buy a coat and I was freezing my ass off. So, I went to the coat check at a local roller skating rink and said my name was John Smith and that I had misplaced my coat check ticket. The woman running the coat check service invited me behind the counter to find my coat. I found “my” coat—a black cashmere overcoat. I would have rather had something from LL Bean, but the overcoat would do.

I was no longer freezing my ass off, so I decided to get something to eat at “Poshy’s.” It was a very expensive steak house. I was seated. The guy seated at the table next to me was eating a Porterhouse steak the size of a doormat. It must must’ve been a $125 piece of meat. I said to hm “Hey numnuts! Is that your mother’s ass you’re eating? It sure looks like it! I’ve got her underpants over here.”

He totally flipped out. He stood up and hurled the steak at me. It hit me in the face, and I grabbed it as it slid into my lap. I ran out the restaurant’s door clutching the steak. I sat down by a dumpster and gobbled it up. My gambit at “Poshy’s” had probably gone beyond snide, but I had scored a delicious steak by inducing out-of-control anger with what I said.

The coat will probably last me for the winter, but eating every day is something else. It is horrible, but I’ve started hijacking shopping carts outside the supermarket from people who’ve finished their shopping and are headed back to their cars. I lurk behind a parked car and pop up pointing a toy .45 and say “Stick ‘em up!” Often, I have to explain what I mean. Once they let go of the cart, I grab it and run like hell behind the supermarket where I transfer what I want to my red wagon. I have a stuffed teddy bear. I put “Teddy” in the wagon on top of the groceries for camouflage.

So far so good. I’ve made it home to the bridge underpass unscathed every time. I have a grill and rickety picnic table. It’s not bad. If it wasn’t for my snidely ways, I could probably go home. But, two months ago, my wife had come after me with a carving knife barely missing my throat as I turned and ran out the door. She had warned me that she was going to kill me if I didn’t stop with the snide comments. I thought she was joking. I had yelled over my shoulder “What, do you think you’re Mack The Knife?” as I bolted out the door. That’s when she threw the knife. It stuck in my left ass cheek. I left it there and ran to “Stitch Wishery” the local free clinic. They took care of me and I’ve been a free agent ever since.

POSTSCRIPT

Our narrator was run over and killed by one of his robbery victims in the supermarket parking lot. When his wife identified him at the morgue, she sprayed bear repellent in his face to make sure he was dead. He was dead. Now she rejoiced. It was good.

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.

Tricolon (tri-co-lon): Three parallel elements of the same length occurring together in a series.

I could be tough. I could be rough. I could be janky. Since nobody knows what janky is, I could get away with being janky all the time. Since I’m switching over to a more obscure and more enjoyable character attribute, I will reveal the meaning of janky as it compliments being tough and rough.

Janky can mean junky—like cheap shit crap. As a character attribute, it’s close to lanky and rhymes with it. Lanky Janky, or janky lanky. Being janky, you can see yourself as one of those stuffed animals you can win at the county fair—maybe a Goofy doll. He’s lanky, and Janky. Or maybe you be cranky janky. That would push you toward tough and rough. Your anger would obscure your janky hood, keeping it obscured and passing for something other than junk, the goal of all junk. Or jankyhood. You sort of adopt the ethos of a used car salesperson—always, all the time, with everything. You begin every interaction with “Have I got a deal for you!” Then you sell yourself as a really valuable piece of jank. You talk about your heritage, your education, your height and weight, the car you drive, and your job as a busboy at a really expensive restaurant: that’s biggest piece of junk that you’ve got to offer. If you pitch it right you’ll have a Janky’s dream: pity. If the person you’re talking to says “You poor bastard,” you have hit the jackpot, the whole purpose for being janky: pity! As you revel in the pity, you realize you’ve found your place in the social matrix: the bottom, the landfill, the garbage heap. Relax on a worn-out seat cushion and cook those potato peels on a stick over the fire in the cracked sink you found.

But that’s not all. There’s more to janky than junky.

It also means faulty or functioning improperly. There’s a lot of room to encompass the human condition in “faulty.” Being faulty is a sumptuous luxury. Being known as faulty, you can get away with almost anything. The rallying cry “I’m faulty” will prove to be a baseline excuse for just about every personal failure, from being late to running over your wife in your driveway and killing her. No matter what ulterior motive you may have had “I’m faulty” will see you through.

POSTSCRIPT

We read this paper several times and can’t really tell what its point is. We think it may be something like the power that adjectives have to determine our lives. Once you’ve accepted an attribution and the adjective enmeshes you, you become the adjective. But, attribution isn’t essence. For example, no matter how much you want to be called “honest,” as a virtue, being honest can be evil. Honesty can hurt peoples’ feelings and even get them killed. Right?

Your being is a constantly rotating kaleidoscope of conflicting points of view. Life makes it rotate. We all live on a fault line, waiting for the BIG ONE.

Just get used to it.

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.

Tricolon (tri-co-lon): Three parallel elements of the same length occurring together in a series.

I ate. I drank. I farted. It was a wonderful night. All my friends had come to my birthday party. I was 77 and I could still walk and go to the bathroom without assistance. The nursing home day room was festively decorative. Balloons of every imaginable color hung from the ceiling. Some of them said “Happy Birthday” on them. The the guys in white coats who were also called “staff” made us wear pointy party hats so they could take pictures for the Trustees.

My urologist had recently prescribed me viagra to take every day for “prostrate health.” Consequently, I had screwed every willing woman in the nursing home. I didn’t care how old they were as long as they wanted viagarian experience. There was one women who was so unwilling that she threw things around me when she saw me coming. Her name was Galatians. Once, she threw her knitting at me. I got tangled up in it, fell down, and broke my wrist.

I had never been so adamantly rejected. I tried my best to honor her wishes. I stopped leering at her and pointing to my crotch. I stopped with the cat calls and making smootching sounds with my lips. Nevertheless, she complained about me and I was severely admonished by the Director, Dr. Ed, who was a cosmetologist who signed contracts with the nursing home’s clientele to do their faces when they die.

He had a giant red scar across his face with a story behind it—he had fallen off a motorcycle and his face had scraped along the curb for 100 feet, coming to rest when his head got stuck in an opening above a sewer grate in the gutter. He lost his girlfriend. He was bullied. He became a cosmotligist.

So, my punishment for my rude and totally inappropriate behavior, was to be taken off Viagra and returned to impotence. A lot of women complained, but the Trustees were adamant. So, in my limphood I was able to make friends with Galatians—the woman who had thrown things at me. I found out her deceased husband was a Baptist Preacher. That said a lot about her attitude toward me. As we were talking, suddenly, she moved her chair close to mine and put her hand on my leg. I got a tingle in my dingle. She told me that she and Dr. Ed were “getting it on.” I was schocked. Now that I was neutered, she felt safe talking to me about sexual things. She asked if I ever heard of a “threesome.” “Hell yeah!” I said. “Don’t worry about your condition. I have something that will help.” She invited me to Dr. Ed’s for what she called a “session.” I was confused, but I decided to go.

I met them a Dr. Ed’s the next day at 6:00. We were taking off our clothes when Dr. Ed’s wife burst in the front door. He said “Do you know what a foursome is?” She picked up a table lamp and started beating him over the head with it. She killed him and we were witnesses. Her trial was messy. She got 2 years.

Galatians and I became close after that. She made me a “health” drink called “Throbbing Goreng.” She had learned how to make it when she and her husband were on a mission in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I drank it down in one gulp and started to rise like a GIF of a sprouting sunflower on one of those nature shows.

Galatians is my only girlfriend. If we weren’t going to die in a few years of old age, or cancer, or something, we’d get married.

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.