...

It's run out of life...uhh...it's got not much time left...Dammit! Times when words spread themselves on your tongue and tickle your uvula and get gibberish out instead of surrendering themselves to coherent talk. Paah! And that's what I said once cos I couldn't get the simple 'validity' word that would explain why I needed to go recharge in the middle of the night.

Words are like those slinky stinkers you find in comics. Those sideline snigger-ers. They scuttle away and peek from behind the corner to see how you're faring in the muck. And this muck has happened too often. But at times, kindly, it is refered to as gaffes. Anything to make the babbling seem light.

But even when in an interview!? Even umm and uhhs abandon me to scavenge for words and then when they're salvaged they come out in this sticky pizza cheese mess that finally snap and slop down my chin and then I'll have to quickly slurp it back before anyone notices.

Sometimes even the deranged hope, the kind your likely to face in oncoming death, gives way, and instead there's just this parrot stutter of blankness, like plain white flashes going bang! bang! bang! But you've got to credit hope for being thick-skinned. It morphs into the street smart and goes about figuring out the opposite of the opposite to the word that sits tightly wedged in a corner like an unreasonably angered child and refuses to spell itself out. Twisted but that's how I got reacquainted with 'altercation.' Truce...agreement...debate...combat...altercation!

Words are also a lot like gigantic unshapely boulders, the kinds preferred to get the sack with the body to lightless depths, where it can be nudged and nibbled by sea folks. When words go down they go down with grammar. Tenses mingle, words surrogate, conjunctions snip. But its these surrogate words that save you from falling face down into something vocabulary-less. For instance, I picked this post from 6 words back after 5 hours and it's not what I had in mind when I stopped. Even the most austere words can surrogate. I had anything but austere in my mind back then.

But context methinks gives word shape more than meaning. And any word can take the place of another, with a little help from conditioning maybe. A Clockwork Orange to start off with was interesting cos of its vocabulary which I took some time to piece together. But then tolchok, moloko, etc began to make complete sense and I even began using it in conversations in my head. That's when the book scared me and I put it away for three months, to rid myself of the vocabulary that had become part of everyday, before I started on it again. That book has proved its point of conditioning.

And words seem to be the other thing apart from music that induces hyesterical joy! Books make you fall madly in love with the most inane emotion, puts you face to face with unacknowledged fears.

Words are fancy creatures.