Have pity on me. I have a dreadful and incurable disease. I have no friends. My family hasn't invited me to a reunion since I was twelve years old when my pestilence was diagnosed. Even casual acquaintances hurriedly walk to the other side of the street when they see me coming. I am a paronomasiac. Like the starship Enterprise, I see puns where no puns have gone before.
As I remember it, my trials began on my twelfth birthday party. My dear mother gave a speech while I stood, poised with a cake knife. She mentioned I was very smart in geometry, so the cake was shaped like a polygon. I said, "Polygon is a dead parrot." Everybody ran to get their coats and left without saying goodbye, the cake disappeared and I didn't get even one birthday gift.
In school, when someone said anything I would change the meaning of a word. In biology when a teacher would define a mouth as an orifice, I would correct him immediately. An orifice is a room where business is performed, I would say. A corona in astronomy became the New York person who checks out dead people. Then when barium was brought up in chemistry class, I naturally I defined it as the thing that undertakers do to dead people...they barium. The physics teacher didn't like my definition of torque as conversation. He told me I torqued too much in class. When I redefined "homogeneous" as a brilliant gay person, I was sent to the principal's orifice.
In algebra I mentioned that a graph was a mammal with a very long neck. As appalling ("Apalling," adj....first name Linus... only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes, one for Peace and one for Chemistry) as my affliction (affliction, a non-factual novel) was, it seemed to evolve to a specialty...living things, usually animals.
Like this: when I went to college, my pet dog, Ralph, came with me everywhere. When anyone would point out Ralph was a Dalmatian, I would immediately correct them. Dalmatian is what happens when you lead a bad life. You go to your eternal Dalmatian. In mathematics I assured the class during a presentation that the hypotenuse was a large animal like a rhino, but with no horn on its head.
The dean told me I had better go someplace else. I informed him that ‘else' was more than one of the letter just before ‘m' and that Llama was an example. I said, "Llama goin' as fast as I can." That afternoon as I went to my dorm room, all my belongings were on the sidewalk.
I figured the University of Massachusetts would be the perfect college for me. With a paronomasiac name like U Mass, how could I go wrong? In Isaac Newton's words, U Mass is equal to U Force divided by U Acceleration. But no, you can't believe how badly they treated me. Even at a frat party where everyone drinks too much, some guy was talking about his pet goose having babies. I said gosling is when you drink beer too fast. Suddenly I was alone in the room and the beer was gone.
Fed up with college, I went on an extended vacation to Peru. When my guide began singing "El Condor Pasa," the national anthem of Peru. I told him that a condor was the way criminals go in and out. It took me two days to find my way back to our campsite. So I went to the Amazon in search of adventure. My river raft tourist group and I saw a huge python hanging from a tree as we floated by. I announced that a python is a contest to see who could eat the most pastry. The next thing you know I was floating down the river alone on a log.
I stopped at the first village I saw because I was hungry, and, thank God, an open market vendor spoke English. One of the barbequed meats looked weird to me, with curly horns, so I asked him about it. "What the heck is that animal?"
"An antelope," he said. "Unique type in Amazon."
"Antelopes.....insects who run away from home to get married," I said.
Once again I found myself floating down the river on my log.
At the next village there were women with enormous bosoms. As I was eating in a local restaurant, the chef came over and introduced himself. He asked me how I liked his village. "I really like the zebras," I said. "He looked at me with a puzzled expression. "There are no zebras in South America," he said emphatically, "much less in our village."
"Yes there are," I said, pointing to a particularly well endowed woman across the room. "Zebras are the largest cup size for over the shoulder boulder holders."
Dragged by two burly men, once again floating downstream on my log, I finally made it to Rio. That night over dinner with some new acquaintances, while telling of my misadventures, someone asked if I had seen any crocodiles. I made the mistake of telling them that a crocodile is a jar of deodorant soap.
Picking myself off the sidewalk outside the restaurant, I booked the next flight home. I was quite a sight, I am sure, disheveled and exhausted, but I managed to get on the plane without further mishap. When the man in the neighboring seat told me he was a chinchilla farmer, however, I couldn't help telling him a chinchilla was the lower jaw in a snow storm.
After I extricated myself from the baggage compartment when we landed, I went home and sulked (sulk...first name Jonas...inventor of polio vaccine). I knew I needed help but no psychologist has lasted more than one visit with me. During the session with my last shrink, he suggested I wasn't telling the truth. I got so angry I began to slip into completely psychotic animal speak.
"Owl deer!" I exclaimed. "Llama gnat lion! Llama gnat a cheetah! Bat's no yolk! Ocelot of bull! Flock ewe!!" I yelled as I stalked out of his orifice.
Butt eye fink hive a sad tail. I ox ewe, canoe whelp me? Yam cating wurst, sow eye iguana pack it in fur now.
