Hoo boy. Like I was saying, back on page 23 [of the print edition, in the story “Spinball Lizard” here on Substack], all you really need (!kneed?) is a good title and the rest is easy. But how on earth are we to unpack this one?1
For starters, a knee is a long way from a tooth, except perhaps in rugby, or maybe soccer, when the players or the fans turn rowdy. Connecting those dots is not going to be easy in any other context, although it is more anatomically feasible to touch your front teeth with your knee2 than, say, with your elbow (though one supposes it's been done.)
(A Mexican red-kneed tarantula. Cool!)
Then there's that “!” which we decided on page 163 [again, in print, see the story “Wisdom Tooth” online] tells us that the “K” is not silent.
Whoa! What is that supposed to imply? “I k-need you?” This runs us into !Gnu territory where I'm inclined to suspect being gored is more a possibility than being !kneed, though gnus are tallish as cattle-like critters go.3 So !kneed? Maybe.
Further, if I !kneed you in some fashion, tooth or groin, I don't believe I'd have to tell you. You would have !gotten the message before I said word one.
Dammit. Now I've got an earworm. Beatles® again.
“You don't realize how much I !kneed you ...”
That one's going to stick with me the rest of the day.
“Love you all the time and never leave you ...”
Which, if true, leads one to wonder why he !kneed her in the first place, but explains some of the other lyrics, viz: “So come on back to me, I'm lonely as can be-ee ...”
If you had !kneed someone I think it would be no surprise that the recipient left.
I'm writing this on Dec. 8, 2020, by the way, and no surprise the Beatles® are on my mind. Forty years to the day since John Lennon's murder, and as the radio reporter mentioned on the BBC World Service® a couple of hours ago, Lennon was quite the song-writer—composing, among other things, what ought to be, perhaps is, the global anthem, “Imagine”—but also an admitted abuser of women. I guess before Yoko straightened his ass out.
(Maybe she threatened to sing if he didn't cut the crap?)
So perhaps he's the one that !kneed whoever it was that left? The song wasn't bad. (Isn't. Running around in my head just now. “Said you had a thing or two to tell me, How was I to know it would upset me?” Aha! That's why he !kneed her!)
Here, however, we have found our link between !kneed and teeth. At last! At last!
“I didn't realize, 'til I looked in your eyes, you told me ...”
“Told” emanates from a mouth, although he's suggesting that her eyes spoke—which, yes, is a metaphor, but no, eyes do not talk. So, she was looking him straight in the eye when she spoke to him, [I] “don't want your lovin' anymore.”
Now a quick look around takes us to another mouth.
There is, we recall, another Beatle®, George Harrison, who wrote a puzzler of a song, about which, similarly, we can't ask, since George, too, has shuffled off this mortal coil.
“Savoy Truffle.”
Explain this to me in any terms other than dentistry: “But you'll have to have them all pulled out, After the Savoy truffle.” You see what I mean?4
We've followed that earworm from leg joint to a mouth full of incisors and molars and maybe even some wisdom teeth! Now we can unpack this thing like a box of chocolates, poking our fingers in the bottoms to see what the filling is, and quickly putting them back in their little brown paper cups if the goop turns out to be something unpleasant.
That's what Mary Anne was doing with the Godiva® treats Doug had given her as a Valentine's Day gift last February. It was sweet of him, of course, but she is no big fan of coconut and the chocolate covered cherries were too saccharine to bear. (Those were a little messy when she plunked them back in their wrappers.) Worse, she was probably going to sit right there and eat all the rest of the nubbins in one fell swoop.
She knows herself.
Why did he have to bring her candy? It felt like, somehow, Hallmark® had turned his brain into mush. He had to !know,5 by now, that she far preferred kippered herring or smoked oysters to chocolates any day of the week, any time of the day. This was their second Valentine's Day “itemized” and he'd had plenty of time to figure it out. Hadn't he?
Mary Anne prodded another bonbon,6 coconut again. “Yuk.” Then another, solid chocolate! Her favorite! She bit off half and set the rest aside. It would be a good one to finish with. Next she prodded a butter-cream. Mmmm. One bite.
She raised the box top to read the fine print. Fourteen ounces. Thank goodness for that! If she ever ate a whole pound of candy in one sitting, she'd shoot herself!
Really, really, really. Why not a bag of potato chips? He had to know she: 1)Loved them; and 2)Had great self-control in their presence. She'd never eat a whole bag of chips.
Well, no, there was that once. After she broke up with Gary. A whole bag of Lays® ripple chips and a whole bottle of Ripple®. But never again. That was not the most pleasant of hangovers. On the other hand, it had sort of cleaned her clock. She got over him in a day. Mostly.
Another butter-cream. Two bites this time to savor it.
Yikes! Gary! She hadn't thought about him in years. Three, anyway. He'd been as indifferent to her preferences as … no, “I'm not going to make comparisons. We are all different in similar ways. And indifferent too.”
Gary. He was something else. A golfer, so what had she really expected? When he wasn't on the links he was reading Golf Digest®, or Today's Golf® or Arnold Palmer's Kingdom®. Kingdom? Geez! Or watching tournaments, live or recorded. It was a shame he was so nice in other ways. Doug was … no. “No comparisons.”
The next two were both liquid cherries. One dripped on her skirt before she could get it back to the box.
“That's gonna stain. Dammit. Damn you ...” Now, now. No blame! It's not his fault.
She carried the box to the kitchen sink, slipped out of the garment and put it in cold water to soak, while she scored another solid. This too she bit in half to save some for later.
Seven left now and six of them were the coconut or cherry type, plus the two halves. She nuked herself a cup of leftover coffee. The bitterness would help.
Funny, that. The salt and the wine had stanched the bitterness she'd felt about Gary's golfing, and now the bitterness of the beverage was going to stanch the too-sweetness of Doug's gift.
She downed all of the remaining bonbons, cherry and coconut included—at least one was butter-cream—and then the leftover halves, between sips of Joe, wondering the while why her love life always led to self-medication.
This she didn't !kneed.
She felt sick enough after that round of candy (and who wouldn't?) (Clapton?) that she was able to carry the physical repulsion over into her feelings about Doug.7 And soon she would be saved by a virus, using the opportunity of this time of cholera to safely social distance and de-itemize.
This coming Valentine's Day she intends to buy herself some pickled creamed herring. If Timothy, who has lately been angling for a date, is smart, I think he'll get her a bottle of Terras Gauda 2019 Albarino Blend O Rosal, Rias Baixas DO®,
As a fellow named Bjork (and who wouldn't look to an Icelander for such advice?) advised in a 2010 blog post about pairing wine with pickled herring: “I tried it recently with grilled salmon slathered with a butter made from salty Kalamata olives and salty Dijon mustard. The wine’s mineral-laced, citrus acidity bit right through the salty butter, but would probably stand up well to all that challenging seafood saltiness.”
I think we'll let another Bjork have the last word.
“Lási vard svo hyr á brá, thvi Lína sagdi "Já"8
1 And that begs the question: Is this a good title?
2 I just succeeded, gamely experimenting so my readers !kneed not.
3 Also previously noted, if one pronounces the “G” in gnu, one is talking Linux software, not animal life, so probably a virus is more likely than goring or !kneeing. On the other hand, in the months since I wrote “Gnawing Desire” (page 68) I've learned that my fabrication regarding European pronunciation was somewhat off base and I'd like to take this opportunity to correct the record. The Hottentot name for the black (or white-tailed) wildebeest is t'gnu (Language #10 or 11), which comes from the call of the male beasties when in mating mode. “Ge-nu!” they cry out. “Ge-nu!” This means that the modern English pronunciation “noo” is wrong from an ethological standpoint. This gets very confusing, very quickly.
4 And just now, all these long years later, I looked it up! (Blaise would be so proud of me!) Wikipedia® informs us that Harrison addressed that song to Eric Clapton who was eating an awful lot of chocolate candy.
5 In this case the “!” is used to indicate her alarm at what he didn't !know.
6 We haven't abandoned French; we just set it aside for a little while. Do you know that “bonbon” is a French noun? It means “goodgood.”
7 Sorry Doug. That's how the cookie crumbles.
8 From “Gling Gló” (1990) - “Lasi wore a happy smile for Lina answered 'Yes.'” And so we've added Icelandic to our word soup! Language #12?
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