Ah, a splendid phrase, quickly brought up from my littered (literatured) brain basement, "a bluther of spaz," a meaningless phrase except to me and I know exactly what it means. I spellchecked it and the spellchecker gave several splendid "corrections"; the one I liked best was "Blythe" for "bluther" (I made this up from talking to my old deceased friend, Luther, "B'Luther ("But, Luther"), you ain't gonna stay on a pair of deuces!") and "spam" for "spaz" (as in the statement, "That rubbery bastard was a certified spaz, man"); so according to the world of Billy Gates's way of spelling unknown words my "bluther spaz" should be "Blythe spam." "A can of Blythe Spam, please," "B'Luther, are you sure?"
Or it could come out "blather spar," which could be a form of arguing, though what I think "blather" means may not be what it means. Or another suggestion is, "blether spay," which seems to imply degenderfying (a verb)--spellchecking "degenderfying" got me "dandifying," which I like a lot--and I can see dandifying as being the outcome of a degenderfying experiment--"Why not just use the damn dictionary?" my ego keeps telling me. Because, it is now too "uncivilized" to use a dictionary--books are old-fashioned; besides, books destroy our forests. Books in their final produced state are helping foul up the planet. For instance, where do used books you can't even giveaway on the sidewalk go when you're through with them (like Orrie Hitt's famous Trailer Camp Tramp)?
I couldn't throw a book in the garbage I don't give a shit what book it is even if it is Orrie Hitt's great novel or even if it's Barry Goldwasser's child-like Conscience of a Conservative, a devastatingly stupid little book written by a certified spaz; or this book I have here in my hands now, finding it gathering filth on a deep corner shelf in my bookcase; it's a book written by actress Tippy Hedron (Hitchcock's Birds--I miss Hitchcock movies), all about her passion for wild tigers and lions and how she raises them in her fab compound just up north of Hollywood. Wow, Herr Doktor Freud, what the hell do you make of that spaz's repressed desires? God, a man has to possess the suprastrength and savage intent of a male lion or tiger with the most aggressively dog-style form of fornication to satisfy old Tippy, whose daughter, Melanoma Griffin, is the very hard-to-satisfy daughter of Tippy Hedron, a very self-centered woman whose last name doesn't match that of any of her mother's last names, which is an interesting Hollywood kid phenomenon--"Hi, this is little Mary Scarfulta, Archibald Leach's daughter by a Fresno whore named Kiki." Melanoma in one of her teevee interviews brags about being attacked by a lion--she doesn't mention it was in her bedroom at Mommie's Neverland-like zoo, which I learned from reading Tippy's badly ghost-written book. [However, the state did not take Melanoma away from Tippy for "child abuse with mother's male lion lover" and all remain thankful to the Christian God for that miracle.]
I've had three chances to ghostwrite in my life. One time for a Scottish psychiatrist. During our third interview (I wanted this job bad, too, because it paid $20 an hour and looked like maybe one of those "eternal" type freelance jobs since this dude was in bad need of his own therapies as far as I was concerned (that's the evaluation I gave him)), he hooked me up to a biofeedback machine--I failed to get the assignment based on my biofeedback reading rather than my knowledge of the workings of psychoanalysis.
This is all the result of reading several recent languagehat posts on spellchecking results and then on to the Google bring all books on line project; by the bye, I just spellchecked "languagehat" and got as an alternative the beautiful word, "lunkhead." I love that word. "I'm surrounded by lunkheads." One wonders at the innerworkings of the spellchecking programming--how does spellcheck work? (It's funny, I keep getting the little red dots of warning that I may have misspelled a word when I type spellcheck; yet, when I turn on spellcheck, the word isn't highlighted.)
I still love my little gaggle of computers and it is because of computers we have spellchecking; the computer was a writer like me's dream come true--and for any of you who have tried to earn your living on an old manual typewriter, you, too, will know what I mean--like, I've had about 40 F-ing typewriters in my life and I had time-consuming F-ups on all of them--on two of my precious typewriters, the "e" keys broke (on one, a brand new Olympia, the "e" character just broke off its stem) during early usage and I would have to go through my finished typings on those two machines and put the "e's" in in ink. And "e" has to be one of the most used letters in the old alphabet (shouldn't it be "alphazed" (spellcheck breaks it down and offers "Alp hazed" as the alternative--that makes sense)?--isn't "bet" for "beta," which Google is always in?--Beta--being tested--a teststate; intestate; testicular state).
I'm somewhere on the lone highway....
U.S. Highway 80; the Bankhead Highway; this is the highway on which my DNA traveled from Savannah, the home of my father's original family's "old General," all the way out to the bald prairie of West Texas; my dad was born on this highway; his family back in Alabama lived on this highway; his family in North Carolina lived on this highway; and later some of his family went on out this highway to San Diego, one brother going on to Hollywood. I lived on this highway twice in my young life and I've traveled it several times, the first time when I was 6 years old and we rode a Continental Trailways bus from West Texas to Washington, D.C., the bus exiting the highway somewhere in the Smoky Mountains to veer off upper eastwardly to get to the District of Corruption. Later I worked a motel-restaurant circuit on Highway 80 from Midland, Texas, all the way out past Yuma and on into Southern California, with a bass player named George Washington and a drummer named Julian who worked several jobs all winter so he could take the summers off and play music but he worked so hard in the winter that he had trouble staying awake during the summer gigs--you could tell when Jules fell asleep at the drums--his time would gradually start drifting off the beat, then way off the beat far enough where you knew you had to wake him up, which George Washington was good at doing, once agilely reaching out with his leg and giving old Jules a swift boot in his snoring ass. Another thing that would wake Jules up were "big shiny stockings," women with big legs and thighs--from a jazz tune by Frank Foster or Frank Wess, I can't remember which, both sax players who worked with Count Basie back in the "golden age of jazz"--which today's young-dick jazz historians are calling the fifties--and that's such bullshit--those were the groundsetting years--the foundation-setting years, the years of the standards rounding off into THE standard.
I miss the highway.
checkeredspelling (a cheap sheep in thegrowlingwolf's clothing)
for The Daily Growler
No comments:
Post a Comment