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Those ticklish words
[ 4 minute read ]
Opinion
I sometimes like to watch YouTube reaction videos and I often have a hankering to listen to Pink Floyd's album 'Animals'; in particular the tracks 'Pigs' and 'Dogs'. There is one reaction video in which the woman listens to 'Dogs' and seems genuinely stunned at the end. She is speechless and eventually says it is uncomfortable and brutal. Her reaction is priceless. 'Dogs' is seventeen minutes and twenty five seconds long though, and there are long periods in which to drift into the music. However, I soon realised that she had been listening to the words, something I have only just started to do when I listen to songs and tunes. Pink Floyd songs are really quite depressing. I had heard a lot of people say that but thought they were talking about the album 'Wish You Were Here' which along with 'Dark Side of The Moon', I think, mourns the demise of Syd Barrett, one of their former band-mates.
I have some of the lyrics for 'Dogs' ready to include here but, really? They might be indicative of a time, and that time seemingly having a similar sentiment as today but I always, with fabricated nostalgia, thought the mid-1970s as being somehow a cooler time to be around. The lyrics seem to negate my ideas of the cool seventies.
One of the comments on the YouTube reaction video I watched is what I think is a prime example of 'Show and don't Tell'; a version that doesn't waffle on about a character's feelings through metaphor. If this is 'Show and don't Tell' then everything in the world will be just dandy again. Here it is:
'I bought this tape and "The Wall" while hitchhiking in England in 1985. Listened to them on a portable cassette player I bought in Birmingham at an outside market. Listened while riding the trains and thumbing it. Burned through tons of batteries. I would sleep under bridges to save the money for more batteries. Shaped the person I am today.'
I totally get what he is saying (said). The whole album for many people, including me, is utterly compelling to listen to again and again. I have even broken my 'Golden Rule', well, one of them, of not hanging on the coat-tails of other people. Anyone can write tomes of personal critique about people and their work and with only the slightest tweak make it acceptable, even if it entices the reader towards anger and resentment. The goal, after all, is to evoke an emotion in the reader. Except it isn't if you post videos on YouTube. There the goal is, if you make reaction videos, to hang on the tails of significant people and monetise one's 'work'. I believe it starts off being easy fun and then once video editors and production people are hired it becomes real work. I suppose it is the same as writing one's own book.
'I am going to write a book,' announced Mimie.
'What will you do, waffle for a while and hope it sells?'
'Of course! You have always said I am the master of invention. You say it every time we bicker. See, you thought I never listen!'
'Touché' Billy replied as he pulled his sabre out with one hand while holding a rapier with the other.
I think the reality is that writing anything that is acceptable to an audience requires more than a modicum of effort and skill. However, you never know you can do something if you don't try. The thing is, from the lowest edge of communication, sitting on a bar stool like a fat toad and spouting uneducated invective to all who are in earshot is both irresponsible and lazy. The whole point behind that rude action is to gain some favour in the reluctant crowd ordering drinks at the bar by piquing their interest. Anyone who directly responds to this toad makes themselves into something similar to a fly; a fly that will alight on other people's sentiment and vomit there to soften their walls of resistance. And, just like a fly, they will suck up the mash, the now conjoined opinions seasoned with confirmation bias, to repeat the operation elsewhere. Ugly stuff, huh?
You gotta be careful with words, real careful. Elma Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny with his shotgun is not the role-model we should be following; we need to be more careful, especially because Bugs Bunny is so much smarter than Elma Fudd. The pen, as we are told, is mightier than the sword (the expression first used by ?) so when Billy drew his sabre and rapier Mimie started writing on the back of a used envelope. 'I am leaving you. You have lost your mind.' She crossed out 'mind' and wrote 'imagination'. To many of us 'mind' means opinion; imagination; mentality (sanity); and is even a catch-all for our maxims; as in 'I am minded to ignore your comments.' You gotta be careful with words.
I felt misunderstood as a sixteen year-old abandoned by my parents into the hands of an older nineteen year old, psychotic psychopath brother. I bought a thesaurus, a Collins Gem Pocket Thesaurus. I was keen to learn new words to explain myself. I was not a good conversationalist and I recognised I had just moments to make my 'elevator pitch'. Unfortunately, I learnt words that other people did not know along with some appropriate ones, so the size of the people who tolerated my company grew smaller and smaller; it did weed out the iguanas from the crowd though. Just remember not to step on them, I thought, some of them bite.
'Proper tickle me, do words. Can't get enough of them. The missus can't stand them so she just stares at me over breakfast before she does the washing up. Shame really. She makes a good breakfast, does my wife, and the house is clean. it's a marvel really, what with her being the breadwinner n'all. If she would only talk more life would be so much better even though I am happy, but she don't like words.'
