Gary's Mostly Pointless Blog

Papers please.  Are you carrying any liquids over 4 ounces?  Currency over $100,000 USD?  Soil or livestock samples?  Do you have anything to declare?  Only your genius?  Who do you think you are, Oscar Wilde?  Never mind.  Yes, this all looks in order.  May I be the first to welcome you to my #fridayflash piece for this week.

This might just be one of the most purposely pointless pieces I’ve ever written, which may explain why I love it so much.  It’s based partly off of a game that my friend Justin Brown and I used to play and also on an old Monty Python sketch.

Brace yourself.  This one’s a doosy…

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POWER WORDS

Brad and Joe stared intently and silently at the space that Brad’s plasma TV used to occupy.  Brad moved his hand up to his face and rubbed the stubble that formed during the week.  His hand made a rough, sand-papery grinding sound which startled Joe.

“AH!  Jesus, don’t do that!” Joe said.

“Sorry, sorry,” Brad said, startled by Joe’s startled reaction.

The excitement of the moment quickly faded back into silence and they continued to visually bore into the drywall behind the entertainment center.  Brad clicked his tongue which echoed slightly throughout his apartment.  Joe looked at him and returned to the work of boring into the wall with his eyes.  Brad clicked his tongue again.  Joe clicked his tongue in response a tone or two lower.  Brad clicked and Joe clicked.  This continued for a while until Joe sighed in boredom, completely clicked out.  Trying another kind of clicking, Joe picked up the remote to the now absent TV and pressed a few buttons, aiming it at the empty space with the imaginary hole in the wall.  He put the remote down and sighed again.  Brad clicked his tongue.

“So,” Joe said in lieu of clicking, “when is it supposed to be fixed?”

“The guy said no later than five.”

Joe looked at his watch.  1:36 PM, read his Casio.  Brad clicked.

“Power words?” Joe asked.

Brad’s face lit up as if this was the best idea he had ever heard.  He willed his expression into one of reserved indifference.  “Power words,” Brad said with a stoic nod.

“Power words” is a game of sorts that they would play when they were bored enough, or whenever Brad started clicking too much.  The goal was to think of a “power word”, but to an outsider, this can be misleading. The real goal was to think of words that were smooth but crisp, stout but silky.  In other words, any word that a beer advertisement would describe.  The kind of words you could put in a wind tunnel with a thin stream of smoke blowing over and the smoke wouldn’t know the difference.  Brad and Joe loved to play “Power Words”, despite the fact that their only power was to entertain them immensely .

“Marble,” Joe said.

Brad nodded as a philosopher would to some insightful comment about the pointlessness of existence.  “Marble.  Mar…bol.  Good start.”  Now it was Brad’s turn.

“Dollop,” Brad said after a moment’s thought.

“Dollop?” Joe asked, as if Brad had suggested that evil is good and vice versa. After letting the word dwell in his mind, passing certain filters and logic checking synapses, he finally said, “Yes…dollop.  Dolllll…up.”

Joe rubbed his chin for a while and extended his forefinger in the air as if a brilliant insight into the human condition just occurred to him.  “Entanglement,” Joe said, curving his finger in an arc to Brad.

Brad looked at him condescendingly as if he had just disproven his own philosophical conjecture.  “Entanglement‽” Brad said without masking his contempt.

“No,” Joe said at once, realizing what a foolish and utterly stupid thing he had just said.  After more thought, Joe said, “Callipygous?” as if suggesting a theory based on precariously balanced logic.

“Callipygous?” Brad said, considering this seriously.  “Hmm…”  Brad brought a flat hand just under his own eye sight, ignoring the imaginary group effort they had abandoned in their wall hole.  His hand moved along in front of him as if slowly petting an imaginary cat.  “Callll-iiipp—no,” he said and brought his hand back to the starting position.  Joe looked on with anticipation, fearing the worst.  “Callll-ipp-iiiiig-uuuuus” Brad said, slowly moving his hand along the path the word made in his head.  “Cal-ip-ig-us” he said again, moving along faster this time.  “Yes,” Brad said, nearly stunned.  “Callipygous!  High five!”  They clapped hands in celebration.

They then spent an inordinate amount of time pronouncing the word in various ways, drawing out each syllable to the breaking point.  Finally brad declared it to be his turn.

“Funnel,” he said finally.  Joe did not disagree.  Joe immediately thought of the word “tunnel” but knew that rhymes of the previous word were expressly forbidden.  The game of “Power words” has many strict rules.

“Bullion,” Joe said.  Brad agreed enthusiastically.

“Hinge,” Brad said, sparking excitement in Joe.  Words like “hinge” were what “Power Words” was all about.

“Sponge,” Joe said, eyes widening.

“Lounge,” Brad said, nearly unable to contain himself.

Joe drew in a breath to say his next word and stopped.  He stopped breathing and his mouth hung open.  Brad waited in anticipation.

“Blancmange!” Joe said. Brad gasped and recoiled from the word as if it were some awesome, dangerous truth.

“Oh my God,” Brad whispered.  “Is that…is that really a word?”  Joe nodded.  “What…what does it mean?”

Joe looked away quickly, desperately trying to remember its definition as if it were God’s private number.  “It’s…uhh…a French something…like, a French dish.”

“Blancmange!” Brad said.  “Blancmange!  Blaaaa-monnnnnnn-ge.  Amazing!”

Time lost all meaning to them as they dissected and elongated the word over and over.  To them it was as if the word were a physical manifestation of infinity.  Their monk-like chanting of blancmange nearly caused Brad to miss the fact that his cell phone was ringing.  They stopped to hear, “Get it straight…straighten up…move forward” coming from his jeans pocket.

While Brad talked, the true purity of the word they had been repeating still boggled Joe’s imagination.  He felt at peace and one with the world.  Joe distantly noticed that Brad had stopped talking.

“Well, they fixed it.  They said it’s ready to be picked up now,” Brad said.

“Outstanding, let’s go get it,” Joe said.

They sat in silence for a little while longer and looked at each other.  They returned to the non-hole their collective psychic power had made.  Then they started saying “blancmange” again.

By the time they got to the shop to pick up the TV, the sun was down and the shop was closed.