Eon Scott| litchaos.com

Distance, my objectiveâ€”

Trouble that day.¨No focus. On anything. Mind wandering, daydreaming. Shrouded in apathy.

You try to keep up. The professor going on and on, jabbering about some dead poet.

Shelley. His wife wrote Frankenstein. I wasn't having it. Any of it. It was time for an allegory-â€¨

I remember when I was a kid. Just like "Bill Cosby" used to say. I was a... freshman? No, sophomore at high school east. There were so many kids when I was a kid; they had to build two high schools. And in those days, the drugs were rampant.

Not like today. I think the kids are too straight. At least while they're in school, for the most part. Too busy taking tests. Studying to be accountants and swindlers. Whatever happened to showmanship?

There was this one particular drug; in fact, it really didn't even have a name. The "heads" called it THC. But anyone with even a teenage grasp of chemistry knew that they wouldn't extract the active ingredient of marijuana into pill form. I'm sure they could have but why bother? So parents couldn't smell it? ¨No, impossible. Or implausible. It was subsequently reported that it was "horse tranquilizer". Now that made more sense. Most delinquents would be more than willing to ingest something with a name like that. However, I wasn't convinced because of the drug's effect. It wasn't like a down; you know, a Quaalude or Seconal. They gave you head that was mellow and put you to sleep. Or shag like a bunny in the case of the Quaalude. No, I remember the prevailing effect of the drug was that it made you "tall". Not tall in the physical sense, I was already tall for my age and had lumps from the basketball court to prove it. No, it made you "feel" literally, "tall".

¨As if, you say? Well allow me, please-â€¨¨You'd be sitting in a class, like I'm doing right now, and you'd be able to float over everyone's head. You'd look right down on them as you floated around without leaving your desk. It was quite remarkable, from a "head" perspective. The teacher wouldn't have a clue as to what was going on.

Then the class would end and you'd go walking down the hallway. This was where it would get really weird since you'd swear that your head scraped the ceiling. Which it couldn't really of course, because the ceiling was a good fifteen feet above you.

Mister Flynn! Oh shit. It was that cunt Dignon. The professor.

-Yes? -

-Might you able to give the class a brief synopsis of this poem by Shelley?

-Sure, the poem is called "ozymandius" and basically it concerns itself with...blah, blah, blah...and his wife's allusions to Byzantine scripture...blah, blah, blah...

¨I don't want to bore you with the details of my response after he'd broken my train of thought concerning days gone by. Dignon was this frazzled and fuzzy looking Scot. He looked like he'd been distilled in a keg of Glenlivet and spoke likewise. Being a fellow descendent of the Celtic tribes I thought at the outset of the semester that he'd be sympathetic to my perspective on all things literary.

He wasn't. In fact, if you were a "mick" he went out of his way to make things difficult.

Take his request for a brief synopsis. A summary, you might say. I'd discovered much to my chagrin that when he asked for "brief", he meant excessive. â€¨Like with his "pop-up" quizzes. Just provide a brief answer, he'd say. Then I'd get the results and upon confrontation, he'd reply in his throaty "burr" that you didn't refer to the book of Job in your response. Book of Job?! Now that was a stretched allusion! So much for brevity.¨Worse than that, it was all his world. You had no choice but to sit and take it like a shnook.¨Which made me wonder as I blathered on with my response and suddenly without intention, I uttered the word, "purposefully". You know how it is, you're going on and on about a subject and as you're still in the preceding thought you discover a place to inject a strong meaty word that will shine with eloquence but you just can't find it and so naturally, you panic. It's gone and nowhere to be found! So what to do? After a brief delay of about a micro-second you awkwardly pause and state the gawky word that does nothing for the rhythm of what you're saying.

I was going to say "deliberate" but I just couldn't "sequence" it,so I said "purposeful" instead.

"Purposeful"? I swear, I didn't know such a word existed. Where did it come from? And to use it seemed so awkward. I thought Dignon was gonna' have a fit.

It was like that other word you hear more often than not these days; "disingenuous". Whatever happened to "insincere"?¨Dignon however, let it go and redeployed his gaze to a cute girl sitting in the front. I just thought he wasn't in the mood to crucify anyone that day until as the days went by, I started to hear the word employed again and again. On televised highly respected public broadcasting political programs like NOW and the News hour. On the radio, even the venerable National Public Radio had a galaxy's worth of announcers who employed it. I hear it in all outlets of the media and it haunts me to this day. ¨Did somebody in the class finally graduate and import it into conventional media? If I'd known, I never would have invented it and I never took credit either.¨Until now-

Biography

Eon Scott, been published at zygote, the beat, monkee
bicycle and a few others. English degree, so I'll never have a real job or profession. All my published pieces have been poetry, yet to have a "story" published. Thanks for time and consideration.