The Year of Suffixical Thinking.

I was reading Mimi Smartypants' recent remark that "Kafkaesque" needed replacing. Her invention is "Kafkalicious". Looking back over my notebooks and other writings, I notice a disturbing frequency of "-esque"-derived terms. So, I marched myself up to the board, and made a list of replacement suffixes.

• ish -- This strikes me as stodgy, and possibly grammatically correct. The last time I saw Stephen Colbert's show, the term "Lincolnish" made an appearance during the opening montage. I want my own suffix, so this is out.
• rrific should be able to denote either good (terrific) or bad (horrific), but in testing, it always tended to add a positive flavor. I'm not certain, but I think I've heard the term "monsterrific" before.
  
• tastic actually seems more positive than "rrific" if that's possible.
  
• rotic seems to add an element of sexuality. The term "Kafkarotic" would most likely be applied to literature that was alternately arousing and frustrating. "Nihilistic Foreplay" would be an interesting band name.
  
• tronic would serve the purpose similar to any of these other suffixes, but only in the context of robots or computers.
  
• gical/stical bring to mind magic and fantasy, but not in the usual sense. They are RPG magic and fantasy. "Kafkastical" would refer to an event similar to rolling a 20-sided die on a card table in Mom & Dad's basement to select an absurd, frustrating fate.

I'm certain that a number of other choices could be invented with a little time and effort, but such are beyond the scope of this page. Somehow, I got the notion in my head that posts to weblogs shouldn't be edited after posting (I think I read about someone who refuses to edit previous posts) and I extended that to the notion that posts should be written as quickly as possible. Five songs have gone by in the MP3 player, so this must go off to the old post graveyard now, and I should start some serious work on the shitty first draft I've been lugging around for six years.

Mail. Ink. Sugar.

The package containing my birthday gifts arrived yesterday. Along with a few Moleskines, Mom packed a box of pop-tarts, some little Debbies, and a couple of bags of coffee (word of my earlier inability to find it must have reached her, despite the fact that she refuses to use a computer or the Internet).





I have no idea where I originally found this picture. If you recognize it, please tell me where it lived before. The reason I'm showing it now is because one of the relics sent along for my birthday was a pen, nearly identical to the one in this picture, except with a clear finish on the wood instead of black paint. The brass parts are all the same. Said pen is capable of taking Fisher refills, and the weight and size are about perfect for me, so it might lead one to ask why I left it in New York when I moved here, but that kind of thinking won't get you anything good around here, Pal. I would recreate this picture now, except with one of the coffee cups in our house here, none of which resemble this this one. Alas, no matter when I try to take photographs, the rechargeable batteries aren't recharged, so the lens deploys with a pitiful sound, and then a beep alerts me that I will not be taking any pictures until I find fresh cells to power the camera.

Somewhere in the search for the origin of that photo, I ran across Hoarded Ordinaries. It had nothing to do with the quest I was on, but the photos struck a chord momentarily. The photos of the monument to Hannah Dustin and the sign leading to a monument (no mention if the path is to the same monument or not) made me think of a vague notion that arises in my notebooks. In the region where I lived until recently, there are a plethora of these signs. Some mention battles or encampments from the Revolution or the Civil War. Some mark significant places in the Native American culture. One marked the first tavern on a particular stretch of highway. The contrast, in my brain, is between the signs, which indicate some kind of interest for non-residents, and the everyday nature of the location, which is never the destination of anyone's vacation. Perhaps that location was the site of something particularly significant, but now it's the parking lot for the drug store.

Another link on Dr. DiSabato's page led to a discussion of NaNoWriMo. That reminded me that I've left my own manuscripts hanging for a while. I was going to do Novel Writing Month this year, but a bunch of stuff came up and I spaced on it completely until today. While I was showering, I briefly thought about the fact that there's no International Novel Writing Month. I think I'm going to say it is in July, because I will have free time then (November is the middle of the semester here, so I hardly have time to eat and do laundry, let alone try to crank out 3500 words per day). Then, necessarily, I tried to similarly abbreviate the name, which led me to say "IntNoWriMo" until the phrase "IntNoWriMo-da-vida" came out. I will go wash my mouth out now, and then start preparing.