A brief character sketch: “He’d never met a woman who was more irritating—always practicing her version of one-upsmanship, a female linguistic bigot, with a way of slithering under his skin like an ant and then nipping and chewing on his nerve ends. She had a keen ear for linguistic nuance. Spanish sounded to her like birds chirping, too fast and about an octave higher than her ear could accommodate. Italian was at least on a proper level, but it always sounded so sweaty, so sexually loaded. Then there were German and Russian and all those other Slavicky languages--like someone gargling or a smoker erupting phlegm. French was the most agreeable, though always sounding a little too much like people whispering dirty words in bed, but in a pleasant tone of voice. English was really the best, though, American English, that is. People from England sounded a little too faggoty for her taste.”
Last night a thought struck me: the similarity of the words martial and marital, I mean, just the placement of the “i.” So I came up with this: “If the eye wanders, marital blisses might become martial hisses.”
I have to include a snippet of a dream I had a week or so ago. There was more to it than this, but this is what stuck in my head. I was involved in another school dream, this time as a man of my current age, and I’d just been assigned a study hall with far too many students, most of whom were doing things I didn’t want. A girl near the left side was acting up and I asked her, “What’s your first name?” She looked at me and sort of disgustedly said, “Toilet!” I stared back, confused, then a thought occurred to me. I said, “Oh, no.” Before I could ask, she said, “Oh, yes, it’s Waters. I’m Toilet Waters.” End of dream.
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