It’s okay, I’m a dad.

One time I wanted to move this great huge rock from my backyard up to in front by the driveway to paint the house number on it. It was terrifically heavy so my plan was to put a big iron bar across a block of wood and just ootch it over a bit at a time. But my buddy Nathaniel, who is enormously big and strong, happened to stop by and he just bent over and picked up the rock and carried it over to exactly where I wanted it. And I thought to myself, “Well, better Nate than lever.”

Based on a true story

Imagine you were to make it your business to write something of marginal interest on a weekly basis and further imagine you applied the peculiar discipline of an invariant length of exactly 100 words. You might assume that the primary challenge would be to limit your verbiage so as to express yourself adequately while maintaining your self-imposed brevity. But some ideas are very small and demand few words. Today’s challenge is to expand the following content to the requisite length: To step on a raisin barefooted is an unpleasant sensation all out of proportion with the severity of the injury.

-sigh-

First, let me clarify right out front that I have no wish to minimize anyone’s suffering. No wait. That’s wrong. What I meant was, it’s not my intention to make light of the pain and discomfort that any given individual or group of individuals may be experiencing. Language is tricky. Like when non-rhotic English speakers write “erm” when they mean “um.” Or how >tsk tsk<, invented to approximate a clucking sound, is now pronounced “tisk tisk.” Language has derailed my original intent here when all I wanted to do was mention that the term Monkeypox Czar sounds funny to me.

for years I was smart

I was wrong to assume the term “pooka,” as applied to Harvey the invisible six-foot rabbit, was a cute invention of the writer; it turns out that these mythical shapeshifting critters have been around for a good long time in Ireland from whence their legend has spread. Come to find out, for example, that the character Puck in a A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of them. So the playwright Mary Agnes McDonough Coyle, who I’m guessing had a few Irish ancestors, was simply using the appropriate term to describe Elwood P. Dowd’s friend. I find that oh so pleasant.