Fermenting

One of my favorite words is fermenting. It’s such a fine word. Letting something sit on the brain and allowing the subconscious to work on it. That’s fermenting for you. I get a line like: “I am a horse, have always been a horse, would always be a horse. Until the witch turned me into a boy.”

The first thing that happens: I am startled. Where did a line like that come from? I don’t know but I am ready to follow wherever it leads. Whatever dance it chooses to perform.

Now some may think I should whip it into shape, make it become what my little pea-sized brain wants.

But that’s not the way of the tao, as Laotse let us know over twenty-five centuries ago. I let it go fermenting. I stick it in the back of my mind, check in every so often. Used to think I was the only one who did this. Then I heard the playwright Edward Albee talk. He said that he will get an idea, stick it away to allow the subconscious to work on it. Check in six months later and see where the idea has flown. Then back into the subconscious again. He does this over a two-year period. Eventually it is full-grown, and a work of art.

After a bit of fermenting, I pull it out for the old look-see. Just so you know, a bit may be six months, sometimes shorter, sometimes more. Nope, it’s not ripened and back into the old subby-conscious it goes, tucked away in the cool, dark places where it gets a chance to grow healthy. From time to time, I pull it out for some nourishment.

Once the idea is ready for the garden, I take it out into the warm sunlight of consciousness. Water it some. Feed it some plant food. And off it sprouts. Soon I have a full-blown work.

It takes a lot of patience for fermenting. It is well worth the time I give it. Look at what it did for Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen. What a lot of writers blame on writer’s block, I call fermenting, giving a work time to sprout muscles and spread its roots.

So be patient. Do some fermenting.

Do you have a favorite word?

Autobiographicles Please

You’ve heard of the Tea Party? You know the thing Alice did with the Mad Hatter? Now c’mon. Not that kind of thing. Get your mind out of the gutter. They had tea. Lately I have been thinking about having me a Me Party.

You see I am three people in one. A Me, a Myself and an I. It’s time I let one of them loose to celebrate. So I am starting with Me. This Me Party will celebrate the Wit and Wisdom of Uncle Bardie’s Me self and will kick off the publication of “Me: The Autobiographical Uncle Bardie”. For those who can’t get enough of Uncle Bardie, there will come a sequel, “More of Me”, then a sequel of a sequel, “Most of Me”. Who knows where it will end? There might even be an “Uncle Bardie’s Magical Mystery Tour”.

All the greats and the near-greats and the not-so-greats and the none-too-greats get to extoll their virtues and their sins in memoirs these days. Why not Uncle Bardie? It is only fair to my multitude of fans. Though I have nothing to say about life, I figure I can say it better than all the others with nothing to say. After all, it wouldn’t be fair to those with inquiring minds if I didn’t. In fact, it would be downright cruel. Uncle Bardie, being a kind man, would never commit cruelty knowingly.

So where to begin? How about at the beginning. I can think of no better place.

I was born on a dark and stormy night in the best of times, in the worst of times. My mama was going to call me Ishmael but that name had been taken by some feller name of Melville. Like Abe Lincoln, I was born in a log cabin. Not actually a log cabin but it sounds better than a trailer park. When I say that, it makes me sound like some kind of Honey Boo Boo. We weren’t trailer trash but my mama sure knew what to do with the garbage. That was why we had a big green dumpster down the way from our trailer.

I was born on the cusp of Virgo and Libra. In other words, my Virgo was slanting into Libra. Guess that makes me a bi-cuspid. There are days when my Virgo gets out of hand and I want to study a problem to death. Other days the only fight I want to participate in is a food fight. Then I want to make sure that everyone in the fight gets at least one pie in the face. Anything to be fair.

The first word out of my mouth was “y’all”. Before I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my mama had me saying, “Y’all come back, you hear?” Like good old Abe, I walked uphill to school five miles, then I walked five miles uphill to get home. I know Abe may not have done that but it sure sounds good on my resume. And who am I to call Abe a liar? You can, if you want. That is your prerogative. Next thing you’ll be saying is that Abe didn’t lick them vampires. At least, Abe read books, which is more than we can say for some presidents.

Early on, I spent a lot of my time curling up into a feeble position. Then I became an introvert who overcompensated. I learned to twerk at an early age. It was my way of mooning the world. As I grew older, I did my best to nip it in the butt. But, as you can see, it didn’t take.

Guess Seinfeld was right. There’s a whole lot of nothing that can be said about nothing and still say nothing. And this is only the first chapter. Just think. This could go on for nine seasons and you’d still have nothing. Makes me want to rejoice in the nothing that is not there and do it nada-istically.

Talk about adverbs. That’s one heck of an adverb. Nada-istically.

If you were writing your memoir, what would its theme be?

Think about it.

Often I let my inner groucho come out for a little looksee. Mostly I do it with language. So here is some thoughts for your edification on Uncle Bardie doing his Uncle Bardie thing.

Language is a wonderful thing I love to play around with. Give me a word like garbage and I am going to be doing a Norm Crosby and say garabage. It’s something I can’t resist.

Did you know there’s supposed to be a funny font? Well, I am here to tell you I don’t think Comic Sans is up to the job. Squirrelly thang, isn’t it? One thing is for sure. It ain’t no Betty White.

Do you know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? When a pessimist is surprised, it’s a good thing. When an optimist is surprised, it’s a bad thing. Think about it.

Talk about songs. I like to take songs and throw them for a loop. Feliz navidad becomes Police-know-it-all. Don’t think so. Just try it.

And if the humor ain’t flowing. If the laughter ain’t coming out of its hole, here’s some jokes for all you discriminating readers.

Nudist woman says to her friend, “I have a blind date tonight, and I don’t have a thing to wear.”

We all know that strippers are popular for bachelor and bachelorette parties these days. My question is what does a nudist have at their bachelor or bachelorette party? A clotheser.

Nudist mother takes a look at her new born baby and says to the nurse, “He looks just like his father.”

You know what you call a private investigator among nudists? I don’t know either, but it is not a private dick.

What do you call a dad’s bike? A popcycle.

Why is the largest party day of the year in the middle of Lent? I’m talking Saint Patrick’s Day here folks. Think about it.

How do they get those bunnies to lay those Easter eggs? Think about it.

Why is it we go to doctors and lawyers who are just practicing? If you had a plumber who was just practicing, wouldn’t you get rid of him. What happened to my kidney? you ask. Oh, the doctor removed it. Why? He was just practicing. Think about it.

Did you know that Minnesota (mini soda) means little Coca Cola? Did you know that menopause  means little hands? It’s pronounced mini paws. Did you know that Minneapolis means little town?  Minnehaha is little laughter. Think about it.

And think about this. The Oxford English Dictionary people are thinking about adding Mx to their dictionary. It can be used as an alternative to Mr., Mrs., Ms. and Miss. So, when you get married, you will be pronounced Mx and Mx. Big question. Who will be the Mx and who will be the Mx? Puts a whole new spin on the term mxmarriage, doesn’t it?

Tae boo: to scare the pounds off of you.

Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation. What a pain. Guess that’s why it’s called punk-tuation, huh?

When I think semi-colon, I ask when is it going to grow up and become the colon it’s meant to be. I hardly ever use a colon. That way my writing doesn’t need a colonoscopy.

I do love to invent words like curioddities.

Add –licious (-icious) to a word and you have a new adjective. And it ntensifies the experience. Example: googlelicious.

incidii (pronounced en-sid-dee-eye): more than one incidious. As in: The incidii conspired to make me look like a fool.

Bet you think I am getting geniuser and geniuser. One of these days I too might be the geniusest.

And finally, what do Christmas and hip hop music have in common? Wrappers.

Now admit it. You did chuckle a little along the way, didn’t you? C’mon, adimit it. No? Then why are you smiling?

Bon appetit.

Doodleboggery

We writers are a peculiar breed. A downright eccentric lot. Many of us live inside our heads, out there in fantasy land where the most interesting things are going on. Which doesn’t make us the most socially adept folks.

Get a bunch of us together in a room and we can go one of two ways. Half of us will talk your head off. The other half will go to a corner and observe. It’s not that half is shy. It is just that they are writers. And there seems to be nary a middle ground between the twixt of the two.

Some of us will let any ole word flop all over the place like a chicken with his head cut off. Some will make the one hundred yard dash for the word el perfecto. Our desire for literarydom can be the difference between digging for treasure or hunting for the holy grail. Some of us are Indiana Jonesys while some are Kid Galahads. Then there are others who would give anything and everything to be the Muhammad Ali of language. But he earned his heavyweight title, and so must we.

When thinking about my own eccentricities, I must admit I have a bit of all these. There are times when I would prefer the corner while other times when I can be the life of the party. Mostly I like to see words stand up and tap a little Fred Astaire across the room. It is a bit of a disease I call Doodleboggery.

When I first invite a character into a story, it’s no Charlie nor Watt nor Janice for me. I go a little funky and call the character something like Doodlebug whether it be a him or a her. I’ve used Mucker, Willy McWhack, George O’George, Helluvagoy, Puddlewhack, Blowfish, Hermittitus, Actina, Elephantitus just to name a few.

Bet you can guess what the Elephantitus is like. His ego fills a room so much that the room explodes and I have ka-blooey all over the place. Yuck. Then I have to clean up the mess. I want you to know it isn’t pretty.

I’ve used Expletive Deleted. All that came out of her mouth was a purple so prose I can’t repeat it here. Shortly after she walked on stage, I did an Elmore Leonard to her. She had her little butt kicked to kingdom come and she hasn’t showed up in any story since. Course there’s always the danger that she will return and be a major nuisance. You just never know.

Characters have a mind of their own and they can Rasputin all over the place. It took the Russian nobility an amazing amount of effort to kill him off. First they poisoned him, then they stabbed him again and again. But he just wouldn’t die. Then they drowned him. The rumor is that didn’t take either. Some say he’s been seen out in Siberia causing major mischief. Maybe we should check with Putin on that one.

That is what I am afraid of when I think about E.D. Had another character with those initials. Just can’t remember what those initials stand for but it’s not Erectile Dysfunction. He had a completely different set of issues. Had a real bad case of the casanova that caused problems up the ying-yang with all the ladies in a story called “Church”. A number of the women in that story, including the minister’s wife, showed up pregnant. I gave him the condom lecture but since when do characters listen. Last I saw him he had a husband after him with a shotgun. He was jumping out of a bedroom window in nothing but his altogethers.

Now this eccentricity that I have to suffer through doesn’t stop with names. It has a tendency to propagate into sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs when I am not sure what should be taking place. Some examples: “She stood on his lawn and hitchcocked her ex, then she went looking for a place to drop his corpus dilecti into.”

Of course, this honors the great director Alfred Hitchcock and the next one refers to the director Francis Ford Coppola. “He performed the coppola early that day, then he took a ride south to his favorite eatery for some pasta.”

You can imagine what a character might do if he spielberged or david-finchered across the planet. I am not quite sure but you can imagine.

Here’s some other ones.

He bonnie-and-clyded his way into the liquor store, pulled his gub and demanded a fifth of scotch from the clerk.” “Gub” refers to an article called a gun mentioned in the Woody Allen epic, “Take the Money and Run”.

“The artist started sloppy but he grew better. Later he found that sloppy was the way to go.” The artist in this one happens to be Jackson Pollack-ing all over the place.

“He grabbed hold of his life and shook it loose of the blues.”

“After six months, Perky broke off her romance with Hunkie. It wasn’t that the sex wasn’t peachy keen. It was. Lots of bodice ripping and muscles rippling. She just couldn’t take any more of his love for mirrors.”

“She’s the Starbucks of my life/I’m the Krispy Kreme of her heart.”

“She sprawled onto the lawn and kissed the ground he walked on. It tasted like chocolate and she had way too too much of a sweet tooth to not take a good bite out of the grass. Over the years that tooth had carried her from Hershey to Giardina to Rocky Mountain Chocolate to the Wee Willy Wonka in search of the perfect elixir. And here it was, in the footprints he left behind.”

And so forth. I know. This eccentricity sounds a little strange as all eccentricities do. That’s why they’re called eccentricities. But what can I do? It keeps my Muse amused. You see, she gets bored easily. And I do not want to bore her. No, sirree. She has a gub too and it is a big one. It is never pretty when my Muse takes over and does a sharknado to my prose.

Anyway all this doodleboggery sometimes leads me out to the edge. Unfortunately this is where it recently led:

“Jan Horstafeller vas a mighty fine fellow. He ate his haggalogen on Vod’s Day, Tor’s Day und Freya’s Day. As he scarfened down his haggalogen, his capagaggas growed to ten feet vide und twenty feet large und Jan Horstafeller vas only a vee bit of a Horstafeller. Haggalogen has tat effect on der person. It enlarges one’s capagaggas enormously. Yah, tat it does.”

I am so sorry but I couldn’t help myself. It’s just a little Doodleboggery.

High School Latin

My high school Latin teacher must have been in her sixties. She looked like she knew Julius Caesar up close and personal. I can’t remember her name but she sure made an impression. There she stood before the class with a bad case of declensionitis. Now it wasn’t as if we in her Latin class had been drafted. We had volunteered. Latin was an elective. We could just as easily taken Spanish. Since we lived in Texas, that would’ve made more sense.

But somewhere along the way the Ancient Romans cast their spell on me. If it had been offered, I would have taken Hebrew and written backwards. But there I sat in Latin class, conjugating verbs that Cicero probably never conjugated. And he was a conjugator in the first degree.

Also I had read that F. Scott Fitzgerald took Latin and I had this dream. I wanted to be not just any writer but a rich and famous one, go off to Hollywood and sleep with lots of great looking women. If Fitzgerald had done it, why not me? A pimply-faced kid with a poor self-image can dream, can’t he?

To train as a writer, I thought about taking Shakespeare. But he scared the bejesus out of me. People put him on such a pedestal. And still do. But Latin. I thought Latin would be such a lark. How hard could it be since the Neanderthals had spoken and written it? After all, pimples or not, I was a thoroughly modern adolescent.

And maybe, just maybe, speaking Latin might get me in with the in-crowd, or at least the intellectual crowd. I was a lonely kid. I wasn’t even geek enough to be a geek. I was so lonely for companionship I got a cat. I couldn’t even do that right. Should have gotten a dog, ’cause cats are not the most companionable of pets. I know there are cat owners who will disagree. But I have a cat and I’m telling you that has been my experience. Latinizing myself seemed like a plan. And who knew? There just might be a Zelda in my future. You gotta remember. I wasn’t the brightest light bulb in the store.

So there I sat among a bunch of other empty minds, waiting to be stirred by a language that had not been spoken in something like 1500 years. Then the the Declensionator sprang some news upon us. We had to drop our w and pronounce the v as a w.

We started demanded our double-u’s back. We became so riotous that three Roman lictors had to be brought in to calm us down. Finally she told us that she would allow us a pickum nickum on the school lawn if we would just calm down.

Once we calmed down, she spun us the tale of Gaius Julius Caesar. His Horatio Alger of a life only proved that any Roman patrician could grow up and be Dictator-for-Life if he applied himself and had a bit of luck. He started off with a family tree second to none but no cash. Being the ambitious kid he was, he had a hankering to conquer the world. Went off to Gaul (which was Latin for France) and gave a good whacking to the folks in Gallia Celtica, Belgica and Aquitania. The English translation for Gallia Celtica, Belgica and Aquitania is Any, Many and Minie Moe.

Pompey, the Big Cheese in Rome, was way none too happy. Told Gaius Julius that he had gotten too big for his toga and his knickers were showing. He needed to humble himself and come on home to Rome and beg the Senate to forgive him for being so successful.

Gaius was having none of that. He headed back to Rome with the Seventh Legion behind him. Unlike the Seventh Calvary, they were in no mood for a Little Big Horn and they were led by a general who was no Custer. He was more like Patton. All Gaius Julius wanted was a parade for doing to Gaul what Pompey wanted to do to him.

So he gave Pompey and the Senate the middle finger and marched on Rome. He did not become Caesar till he crossed the Rubicon, singing “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” From that day on, his business card said Caesar.

Pompey did a quick exit stage right and lit out for all parts east. Caesar followed and pretty soon he was veni-ing, vidi-ing and vici-ing all over the place, giving Pompey the what-fors here, there and everywhere. Caesar did the Napoleon thing. He went down to Egypt and all hell broke loose. Pompey lost his head over Cleopatra. Caesar was downright pissed. Only a Roman got to knock off another Roman.

Before he knew it, Cleo had Gaius calmed down. She spread her legs and Caesar went ga-ga over the original Lady Gaga. He, in his W. C. Fields of a voice, told her like he told all his girlfriends, “Veni, vidi, vici.” She retorted, with a Mae West that made Mae West think twice about using that voice of hers, “No, you veni-ed, you vidied, but I vici-ed, big boy.” She had him in the palm of her hands, showing him the pyramids.

The thing was that Gaius got bored. He’d seen all the pyramids he wanted to see. A pyramid here, a pyramid there, everywhere a pyramid. He saw so many pyramids they started reminding him of Stonehenge. All he needed was a Druid and he could have a human sacrifice. Now, wouldn’t that be a party? he thought. So he decided to get the hell out of Dodge and head back to Rome where the plebs worshipped the ground he walked on.

Bad idea. Before he knew it, he was etu-ing Brute’ all over the place. At that point, he had a bad case of the “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” And that was that. It was the good ol’ bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

Of course, we Latineers in that high school class found all this fascinating, especially the part about Cleo spreading her legs and making ol’ Cez go gaga. We all shouted, “More, more.” Miss D thought real hard and asked, “You ever hear of a toga party?” Then the bell rang.

Over the months that followed, we learned orgy etiquette. We learned about the Roman hero, Biggus Dickus. We even conjugated a few verbs and learned ignoramus does not mean stupid. It is first person plural and it meant “we do not know.” And of course we didn’t. But what the hey. It was Latin.

I must admit that I was not a very good conjugater . Every time she asked me to conjugate, I pulled a Rush Limbaugh and changed the subject. If you can’t win, you take the conversation off in a different direction. I had been reading Livy’s “History of Rome, so I asked, “How about those Pubic Wars?”

She said, “Yes, they were really hairy.”

It all worked out. I managed to con my way through two years of Latin and end up with a B. I could now use the phrases carpe diem and per diem appropriately, and I knew semper fidelis was longhand for semper fi.

Soon I graduated and went out into the wide world, thanking my lucky stars that I would never have to conjugate another verb. Then it happened. I saw “The Life of Brian”. In it, there is this guy writing graffiti on a Jerusalem wall: “Romanes eunt domus.” A squad of Roman soldiers show up and the centurion starts correcting the zealot’s Latin, finally saying, “Romani ite domum! Now write it 100 times before sunrise, or I’ll cut your balls off.” I had nightmares over that one. I kept substituting Miss D for the centurion and I was the poor smuck of a zealot.

Could have happened. In a previous life.