Metaphors

Metaphors are color schemes.  Yuck!!!!!!!!  I just used one.  I hate metaphors.  I love metaphors.  Sometimes I imagine being a person without the ability to distinguish between connotation and denotation. 

So my conservative friends tell me to pick myself up by my bootstraps.  But I'm wearing Chuck Taylor's and I don't have strappy boots at home either.

Worse.  My teacher tells me to keep my nose to the grindstone.  This time I'm in big trouble.  I'm just wondering which one.  I'm hoping just the buffing wheel.  Probably wouldn't go much deeper than epidermis. 

My dad's favorite metaphor is an exclamation -- "Hold Everything!"  This one I have actually tried, unsuccessfully of course.  I think when I tried to hold on to Mother's China tea cup with my big toe is where I got myself into trouble. 

I've heard many amusing metaphors for unexpected occurrences:  "Shit a brick!"  "Christ on a Harley!"  "What in the Sam Hill?! (I have been searching years for the origin of this metaphor and have come up empty handed!)" 

Then there are some of the old hillbilly side of the family sort of weird ones like, "Oh, Forevermore!" and simply "Oh Murder!"  Kinda creepy.  Reminds me of a song Tony and I have been working on for about ten years.

But then metaphors are awesome as well.  Like when Juliet and her fancy girlfriends came into the big party, Romeo said, "... a snowy dove trooping with crows!"  That's writin rite thar. 

And the best songs and poems are laced with them as well.  I have a good friend who writes things like, "I am lightning.  She's the tallest tree." and also in a different piece, "There's a girl who read the writing on my wall.  She has seen my darkest colors and does not care at all."

Why I even had a metaphor applied to me the other day by a therapist.  She said, "Your are like the little train from the book." (technically a simile, don't split hairs (shit!))

WK