We Can Hear What You're Really Saying

In a heavy southern accent, the DMV examiner asked our seventeen-year old son, Adam, if he had ever been convicted of a DUI?

He said, “Yes.”

Adam didn’t drink. Or drive. Or have a license. What he really meant was, “I’m a little nervous.”

Communication is a tricky, tricky business these days. Political correctness, rampant hypocrisy, personal agendas, and the fact that everyone with fingers has a website and is selling something has put a crimp in getting the straight story with veracity.

Veracity?

Crap. What does that mean? Technically, it means “habitual truthfulness.”

Truth? Oh boy, but I’ve heard that truth is a relative term, because I go to college where simple things become as nasty and complicated as a knot in the shoelace of a toddler’s tennis shoe—that has been urinated on all day.

Relative?

Relative means that your truth is not my truth or our truth is not their truth unless it’s true on Comedy Central.  I think.

How is truth supposed to work if we can’t agree on whether or not there actually is a knot in that shoelace? Or whether or not the smell wafting up from that shoelace is urine when we have to untie that shoelace knot with our teeth.

Examples of relative truthfullness include:

Hearing politicians call their LIES misspeaking. “I know I said that there would be a chicken in every pot, but what I meant to say is that everyone should smoke some pot, and then you won’t care one way or the other about getting free chicken.”

Hearing politicians caught in their LIES, claiming that they could have said something more “tightly.”  More tightly????? “I know I said that I was born in a log cabin without a pot or a chicken to put in the pot, but what I should have said is that I made all that stuff up.”

Hearing politicians deny their LIES.  “I had no idea that I said that stuff about free chicken. I found out when you found out on the news. And they never get anything wrong. Right?”

Don’t even get me started on the phrases “cutting edge,” “mean-spirited,” or “stupid doo-doo head.”

It is my grandchildren’s “reality” to call me “mean” when I refuse to let them overdose on Otterpops. “You are a mean old YaYa for not letting us eat enough frozen sugar water to give a whale diabetes.”

But I know that what the children are really saying is, “It’s so hard learning to be self-controlled.”

Truth. Civility. Semantics. It’s a relative minefield out there.

Linda (Doo-Doo Head) Zern

Thank You SCWG

* JANUARY 25, 2014 * COCOA BEACH WRITERS' CONFERENCE *

HIGHLY MODERN CARP

Heather, our oldest daughter was four years old when she started taking ballet classes. It helped her grow up graceful, cultured, and beautiful. We have been watching her recitals, productions, and shows since she was four years old.

She is swanlike. We are swine-like. Of course, her dad is the head swine, and I am the swine queen.

When our daughter danced in a showcase at her college we packed up our pork rinds and ball caps and tromped right down to sit in the front row to watch her. We’re swine, but we’re supportive.

The production included traditional dance numbers, a stunning number choreographed by our daughter, and then . . . a dance piece in the . . . um . . . er . . . highly modern style.

I consulted the program. The highly modern dance was called Viscous (as in, the thickness of liquids, also goo.) During the highly modern dance, dancers (we think they were dancers) were covered head to toe in muck green leotards (we think they were leotards.) The mucky green bunch began the dance piled up in a moldy looking heap. I knew we were in trouble when I realized the title of the piece might mean sludge.

When the moldy pile of dancers began to crawl, creep, and convulse around the floor as the music (we think it was music) moaned, I began to worry. This was not going to be received well by my husband, the computer analyst math geek whose idea of modern dance is standing up and stretching.

The dancers continued to twitch and creep. I tried hard to look contemplative and to think deep thoughts about thick liquids. I prayed that it would end quickly.

Alas, no. On the music moaned. On the dancers rolled and oozed. On and on until, like that kid in that story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” my husband pointed out the glaringly obvious.

“This is crap!”

Or he might have said, “They look like carp.”

I’m not sure. At this point it all gets a little blurry—crap, carp. Who knows what he actually said? But I’m pretty sure he said it right out loud, not yelling out loud, but loud enough. You know? I don’t think he pointed.

However, what he did next is seared into my memory. He laughed.

First it was only a muffled chuckle, trapped behind his hand, but then as the green muck folk quivered closer he laughed through his nose, mouth, and possibly his ears. It was loud. And like an infection, the laughter spread from my husband to the others, row by row. It radiated out like ripples on a weedy pond. Several audience members tried to control their laughing by stuffing their own fists in their mouths. This caused more laughing—a lot more.

I was desperate as the levity rebellion spread, and I snapped, “If you don’t stop laughing right now, I will take you out of this meeting, Mister.”

Later, Heather reported that one of the dancers backstage with really good hearing observed, “Hey, someone out there is laughing.”

Heather said, “That’s not someone. That’s my dad.”

After the show, one anonymous critic was heard to say, “Those dancers looked like those danged slugs in my garden.”

Sherwood had no further comment. We went to Dairy Queen.

Actually, I love the way my math wizard loves to point and say, “Hey, the Emperor has no clothes on. That dude is naked.” Of course, usually, the naked dude is Sherwood. Oh, wait. That was in high school when streaking on motorcycles was all the rage.

What we lack in culture, we make up for in bravado.

Linda (Pass the Pork) Zern