Immoderate Musings; Quibblesome Quarrels; Risible Rhapsodies on Music and Morals Silly sallies into the sportive prolixity of sesquipedalian taradiddles and daffy dillies of diddling fiddle-faddle and fulsome philosophical flapdoodle. by David Van Alstyne Dedicated to my father Arvo Van Alstyne in memory of his oft repeated advice to me as a little boy: "In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, and articulating your superficial sentimentalities, sedulously eschew prolixity and circumlocution, and rigorously minimize rodomontade and thrasonical bombast." [In short: Don't use big words] PREFACE PAGE 1 Verses 1 - 48 Verses: 10 / 20 / 30 / 40 / GLOSSARY PAGE 2 / PAGE 3 / PAGE 4 / PAGE 5 / PAGE 6 1) Hurling herculean hype and hyperbole in hysterical hails of exhortation hewn in humorless hues of hubris and honed and toned to the inflammation of 2) hoarsely harping and heartily carping in a howling hullabaloo of harsh allegation by high-minded homilies and haughty huffs and puffs of irascibly hierophantic expostulation, or 3) haranguing hog-wild in perfervid philippics with a harebrained ballyhoo of histrionic oration (a most outstandingly inadvisable invitation to the outing, by inadvertent hypostatization, of the 4) unwholesomly harrowing hideous hubbub of sermonic temper tantrums tellingly tainted by psychosomatic convulsions of delirium with dyspeptic hidrosis and hyperventilation) can 5) only serve to impede the fatidic advent of a bright golden age of Apollonian apperception and the securely sequential result and ramification of its expeditious, even preternatural, precipitation of the 6) wondrous epiphenomenon of societal ascesis and its provenance of factional restraint and coaptation; a conceptual meal; a delicious ideal, though as yet, still a high pie-in-the-sky vaticination from the 7) stout, rugged, irrefragably incontrovertible esperance for irreversible immigration into the happiest combination of warm utopian sunshine, universal peace and good will, intrinsic well-being, and fundamental sanctification, (for 8) some, that's nothing more than a futurological abstraction, yet evidentially, it's a concrete eschatological destination; a safely peaceable pandect, a teleology of fate framed in faith-bolstered grit and presentimental anticipation) while 9) admittedly, fleetly floundering and foundering yet further into a forbiddingly befouling fog of flat-footed failure by our foolhardily forfending any informal figment of forum featuring the forthrightly fructifying fomentation of 10) even a vague pretense of fainthearted feigning of the sedulous eschewal of its denaturalization, or the unsightly semblance of any chary limitation, if not the actual razing and final eradication, of 11) all the old ignoble offices of institutional vice which spurn sublimation (but spawn facilitation of the accursedly mercenary screens of normalization) for our favorite nefarious forms of naughty stimulation under the 12) protective aegis of low-life legalisms; an addlepated ethos of unlimned liberation; a competent configuration to brace, boost and buttress our bald buzzardliness in blindly besotted infatuation with 13) horridly hot choler and hair-triggered spleen spewing from fabulistic furnaces of larcenous litigation and founded on such darned dillies of diddling fiddle-faddle, philosophical flapdoodle and follies of ideation as the 14) damnatory, diabolically dismissive despoliation of guileless glad-handing and free fraternization, a depreciatory opiate of hazard-free asepsis in the indurate idlesse of our collusive invocation of the 15) indisposing ails of ennui; the unignorable ills of neoteric acedia (a grievous agglomeration), and the obtrusive continuation, the pernicious proliferation, of selfward doubt and down-putting denigration in our 16) inchoately afflictive malaise of abulia; our anomalous quandary, our quag of anomic diffidence and the destructively chafing and sorely abrading afflatus of our stiff-lipped estrangement, that absorptive alienation which 17) elicits an array of antinomian gymnastics, a false, unfunny facade of levelheaded gumption ever fueling facile furies, a font of fussy fusillades filled with hypocritical horror at the withering imputation of 18) flitting, fluttering and fumbling in a flailing kerfuffle of funambulistic flouncing through stumping stumblebummery in frantically futilitarian flares, flurries, fits and flusters of rending rectitudinal flexure and shifting fluctuation, and is 19) propense to deign neither the casting of aspersions, nor the passing of glances askance or of any discoloration, nor in acquiescent silence suffering idiolectal slams from certain snippy snipes who sling stigmatization on 20) obnoxious irregularities of jejune impropriety, or disgraceful mots of opprobrious ethical variation, or electrifying effronteries of disgusting moral turpitude at the very vanguard of actionable legal aberration. No. 21) Not with the currents of contemporary ochlocracy in our supposedly halcyon hyperkinetic habituation to heinously heedless and wholly heathen decadence; our convivially cozy, self-coddling collaboration in 22) headless hedonism; our alarming acquiescence in the exoneration, homologation, and passive ratification of such disparate paths of self-excuse in our accreditation of a massive catalogue of distemperate modes of depravation); our 23) brassy bravado and unbuttoned braggadocio in what should be the daunting dint of Dionysian debauchery; our attitudinized affinities of hasty approbation, if not unapologetically apoplectic promulgation, of 24) swimming through swamps of sewerly slop and swill with drunken delight and downright ditsy delectation in the routing, the disastrously dizzying devaluation, through higgledy-piggledy daily deformation, of civilization wherein, 25) haplessly hamstrung, more than half-haggard and harried, horribly hampered, harassed, hung, hassled and hectored into a phylogenetic phase of glazed bleary-eyed haze; an unseeing gaze on impending incapacitation, we 26) carelessly cruise and carouse, careening ever closer to a head-on crash with functional cessation until, clearly unkenningly, we court a collective calamity of real rue, ruinous rack and rancid relegation to the 27) old proverbial landfill; the dustheap of history in a turbid imbroglio of embarrassing flirtation with uncurbed carnal caprice; a somber indication of our growing gravitation toward the edge of obliteration, ever in 28) sleepy subjection to the natural operation and ongoing force of speeding centrifugation, in apathetic nescience to the increasing acceleration of our hair-raising plunge into the dumps of decimation; into a 29) down-home drubbing of unprecedented despair; a hot subliminal Hades of drudging dilapidation; a potential depilation in dry dystopian deserts of dysphoric deformity and detracting derogation; into a 30) teary drought of promise and incurable disrelation; our undoing by dolor and disrelishable desiccation; into the very nidus and presage, the ripsnorting bull's eye, of distinctly irremeable, contortive exacerbation, not just the 31) petty little namby-pamby epicyclical episode, nor a lean little kink of ephemeral irk and irritation, nor a cagey game of charades based on moonstruck denial of our lunkheaded perplexity and inexplicable exasperation, but a 32) real doozy, a humdinger of apocalyptic bust: a bottomless barranca; the specter of Armageddon; a global Gotterdammerung; an over-the-cliff katzenjammer of unmitigated miff mixed with febrile frustration through our 33) unwarrented warfares; our whopping wants and whimsies; our wistfully wandering wayward, wild and willingly willy-nilly through tracts of human wilderness in self-whittling wonder; through eerie moonscapes of hypnopompic speculation until, 34) nonchalantly pococurante, we finally come to unwittingly ape a pyrotechnical pandemonium of stampeding pismires, and with defining incuriosity, we make an imprudent procession; an incommodiously peppy parade; an acephalous peregrination down a 35) long primrose path, a precise and prissy promenade; a decluttered and well-buttered chute down to the transpiration of a prelusive epitasis leading to flabbergastingly short-sighted but trendy spiritual suicide in a circus of self-desecration in a 36) broad motly vastitude of variegated lechery; the expansive attractions of lascivious incontinence unhinderedly herding us straight into the absurdly siren, perilous imminence of ignominious self-immolation in the 37) fire-pits of uneducably libidinous callosity (with a paucity of any pensive equiponderation); in an increasingly intense inducer of infuriation, a molto crescendo of cacophonic cachinnation, and 38) creepy concoctions of crapulous crassitude; an all too perceptibly frequent demonstration of occult cabalas in thermogenic cauldrons of heaving voluptuosity for the steamy provocation to 39) ransack, rifle and raven all the slimy sludge while passively partaking of the gaudy agglutination, that monstrous cornucopia of cyclopean quantification, that kaleidoscopic Babel of titanic temptation to 40) pack a pitiful profit from the prideful prodigality of those overactive engines of profluent profligacy which imbrue the knotty nub, that nasty nettlesome nodus of the glowing inferno of ontological perturbation in this 41) Babylonian bacchanal of protean perversity; this pandemic bash of irrepressible promiscuity; this flighty but flightlessly farcical festival of fiendish, feverishly infectious inebriation with the 42) very most brummagem, conceitedly kooky chimera, and contemptible course of coarsely constrictive divination ever to find itself cooked up in great big broiling vats, then laid open, subjected to visionless evaluation,, only to 43) become all high-and-mighty in the threat of correlation (by significant shrinkage through paedomorphic retardation) with anyone's assailably arenaceous foundation of gnosis, common sense and cognitive registration by a 44) ruddy ruse of balmy spin, garrulous loquacity, selective report and relativistic rationalization, leaving many people dumbstruck in wide-eyed befuddlement, hosed and hypnotized in benumbing dissimulation of the 45) laws of reciprocity in the sudorific expectation of wrenching remorse over the wreaking of wreckage in the ineluctable reaping of an unhallowed harvest rightly redolent of karmic wrath, rebuke and damnation long 46) garnered by gleaning garbaceous gaggles of glop; those immaterial, moldering masses of meretricious chaff; the toxic bottom scrapings, the dreck, dregs, dross and detritus, the obstruent guerdon of expediential miscomputation; that 47) stinky, smoldering trash; that aromatically moldy mash indiscriminately tossed up and scattered in whirlwinds and turgid williwaws of pseudo-scholastic manure all over playgrounds of pruritically prurient imagination; those 48) "Lizard-Brained" portions of the willfully uneducated mind; that psychic tumultuary from whence are conceived and hatched all germinal eidolons, phony bogeys, of dastardly design for criminal acts of really wrongful glandular gratification. GLOSSARY (back to verse 1) Merriam-Webster Dictionary Hurling herculean hype and hyperbole - throwing out wild exaggerations like they were wedding cakes in a food fight hysterical hails of exhortation - suggestions you would expect from a stark raving lunatic; or what some teenagers expect from their parents (and sometimes visa versa) hewn in humorless hues of hubris - where your foolish pride, which leaves no room for humor, show right through your attempts to prove how humble and funny you are honed and toned to the inflammation - spiffed up to keep pace with growing needs (back to verse 2) Merriam-Webster Dictionary hoarsely harping and hardily carping - complaining so long and loud that you start to lose your voice (maybe from other people trying to strangle you) howling hullabaloo of harsh allegation - like the quiet mutterings of a prosecuting attorney, at least as they sound to the defendant high-minded homilies - overbearing lectures on morality, usually given by a hypocrit haughty huffs and puffs - the famously sinister tactic used by Mr. Big Bad Wolf when he blew down the houses of two of the Three Little Pigs irascibly hierophantic expostulation - earnest reasoning made to sound like some kind of esoteric, sacred mystery (back to verse 3) Merriam-Webster Dictionary haranguing hog-wild in perfervid philippics - bitterly ranting and raving as if your hair is on fire and all people want to do is roast marshmallows in it harebrained ballyhoo of histrionic oration - the hysterically theatrical way politicians belch out their dumb ideas, and defense attorneys win freedom for murderers most outstandingly inadvisable invitation - an idea that's worse than most for what to do next, like asking the police officer who stops you for reckless driving to hold your open whiskey bottle because you need both hands to open your glove compartment or else your gun will fall out while you look to see if you can find an old driver's license outing, by inadvertent hypostatization - accidentally telling the truth where people can hear you (back to verse 4) Merriam-Webster Dictionary unwholesomly harrowing hideous hubbub - a turmoil so confusing that it threatens your physical health sermonic temper tantrums - where you are giving a talk in church, and in order to appear more spiritual, you throw yourself across the pulpit, pounding and screaming tellingly tainted - revealing something slightly amiss (like when you are out enjoying a romantic dinner and your baby-sitter calls in hysterics to ask where your fire extinguisher is) psychosomatic convulsions of delirium - uncontrolled fits of frenzy, caused by nothing but your own emotional disturbance; what teenagers think their parents are experiencing when simply asking, as they go out for a few hours, that the house not be turned into a neighborhood flea-market, a drug den, or a brothel dyspeptic hidrosis - the sweat that breaks out when you watch the latest news about Congress hyperventilation - where your breathing gets so fast and deep that it makes you want to throw up and faint (like when your daughter introduces you to her new boyfriend) (back to verse 5) Merriam-Webster Dictionary impede the fatidic advent - to interfere with, and thus slow down, the predicted arrival of something (as when, for example, you hijack an airplane and thereby cause it to be late) Apollonian apperception - where you view the world as being full of order and harmony securely sequential result and ramification - events that are standing in line just waiting to happen because of what you did, as in the high probability that you will land somewhere, even if it makes you flat as a pancake, after you jump off a cliff expeditious, even preternatural, precipitation - causing something happen so quickly that it defies rational explanation (back to verse 6) Merriam-Webster Dictionary wondrous epiphenomenon of societal ascesis - our collective wisdom and self-discipline being an amazing part of a larger process that caused it in the first place, for example, when we behave ourselves under the threat of total annihilation if we don't provenance of factional restraint and coaptation - liberally bestowed gifts of whatever it is that inspires social and political enemies to control themselves and work together for their own common good conceptual meal - an idea you can bite into without breaking a tooth or gaining weight delicious ideal - a conception that's wonderful to the tastebuds of your mind high pie-in-the-sky vaticination - an unlikely hope or prediction (like the silly notion that Santa Claus will bring you a pile of Christmas toys while you're in prison for burning down a toy factory) (back to verse 7) Merriam-Webster Dictionary stout, rugged, irrefragably incontrovertible esperance - where, for example, you maintain the hope, toughened by many successes, that, despite your body's insistence to the contrary, if you manage to get out of bed on time for work, it will not kill you irreversible immigration - describes a skydiver when he jumps out of the airplane just before he changes his mind intrinsic well-being - where your feelings of good health and happiness come from within, regardless of external circumstances fundamental sanctification - where your most deeply rooted characteristics and values are not likely to get you arrested (back to verse 8) Merriam-Webster Dictionary futurological abstraction - things you imagine about the future (includes anything from what to have for dinner to how soon the sun will explode) evidentially - useful as evidence concrete eschatological destination - the exact place where we hope to find ourselves when the world comes to an end safely safely peaceable pandect - a written article which, you can bet, is not trying to pick a fight, or start a war, as it discusses all possible aspects of peace teleology of fate framed in faith-bolstered grit - the study of all evidences that there is actually design in nature, as opposed to chaos or coincidence, colored by the attitude that we must pray as if everything depends on God and then work as if everything depends on us presentimental anticipation - the basis upon which people make wild and crazy bets (back to verse 9) Merriam-Webster Dictionary fleetly floundering - looking swift and nimble even while you are greatly confused, an essential skill for orchestra conductors and ballet dancers, foundering - falling apart forbiddingly befouling fog of flat-footed failure - the bewilderment that rises like a poisonous cloud from the sudden wreckage of your hasty mistakes (like when you discover you've brushed your teeth with acrylic paint instead of toothpaste) (or your demolition company has just mistakenly torn down a chemical research laborabory instead of a parking garage) foolhardily forfending any informal figment of forum - rashly putting off even the faintest hint of any possible way to discuss an idea (how a 16-year-old would describe his parents' unreasonable reaction to his request to built a campfire in the living room) forthrightly fructifying fomentation - similar to setting something in motion that will explode like a bomb filled with chunks of fruitcake (back to verse 10) Merriam-Webster Dictionary even a vague pretense of fainthearted feigning of the sedulous eschewal of its denaturalization - even merely acting as if we're doing a poor job of pretending to totally disagree that something is unnatural, and even we are confused by what we're making believe is real, or might be real, or isn't real (Huh??) unsightly semblance - where a thing looks exactly like something else, only completely different because it looks worse chary limitation - very carefully trying to keep someone like yourself, for example, from throwing a pie into the face of the first person who comes in the door, or being very sensitive about how you tell your dog he's not allowed to drive the car razing and final eradication - demolishing something, then pulling it up by the roots once and for all (what some bosses and so-called friends can do to your self-confidence) (back to verse 11) Merriam-Webster Dictionary ignoble offices of institutional vice - the hallowed halls of congress, and other places of public entertainment, where moral depravity is systematically embedded into our culture spurn sublimation - where you absolutely refuse to channel your scandalous impulses into more acceptable forms of expression spawn facilitation - make it easier accursedly mercenary screens of normalization - where in order to maintain the flow of dirty money, all kinds of disgusting breaches of human decency are protected from the law on grounds that public acceptance makes them permissible nefarious - not fit for polite company (back to verse 12) Merriam-Webster Dictionary protective aegis of low-life legalisms - the means by which sleezy judges, lawyers, government officials, and other such criminals find loopholes in the law to keep themselves out of jail addlepated ethos of unlimned liberation - a thoroughly confused but popular idea that you can do anything you want competent configuration - a useful arrangement (of the facts, in your mind) brace, boost and buttress - what your friends sometimes have to do to you, just to keep you standing bald buzzardliness - where because of either your appearance or your behavior, often both, you look like a buzzard while thriving on the misfortunes of others blindly besotted infatuation - where, with the help of knowing very little about something or someone, you fall madly in love with what you believe the thing or person to actually be, which explains why so many people who think they're in love walk into telephone poles or open manholes in the sidewalk (back to verse 13) Merriam-Webster Dictionary choler - the disposition to be irritated ("I dare you to hit me on the head with that hammer, and see what happens next!") spleen - suppressed anger that sometimes leads to a murderous rampage or other embarrassing social faux pas fabulistic - a falsehood which, other than being false, is very reliable larcenous litigation - lawsuits that amount to thievery dillies of diddling fiddle-faddle - real humdingers of time-wasting nonsense, such as political ideals you don't believe in philosophical flapdoodle - utter nonsense based on logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, morality, and epistemology (in other words, eloquent defense of the indefensible) follies of ideation - dumb ideas (back to verse 14) Merriam-Webster Dictionary damnatory, diabolically dismissive despoliation - not only pillaging, plundering, and wreaking havoc everywhere you go, but also saying impolite things while you do it guileless glad-handing and free-feeling fraternization - shaking hands and being friendly with all, and not even charging money for it depreciatory opiate of hazard-free asepsis - something that quiets your nerves by sucking all the warmth and vitality out of you, yet without risking any more damage than that indurate idlesse - where you've been hardened into idleness, or maybe you've just gotten so stiff you can't move collusive invocation - conducting business for illegal or deceitful purposes by secret agreement or criminal cooperation (as in drug cartels, prostitution rings, the Mafia, the press, the government, etc.) (back to verse 15) Merriam-Webster Dictionary indisposing ails of ennui - being so bored that it makes you sick unignorable ills of neoteric acedia - negative effects you can't ignore once you've become lazy in ways nobody ever thought of before grievous agglomeration - a pretty pathetic pile of things you've put together obtrusive continuation, the pernicious proliferation - the unusually destructive rise and growth of something selfward doubt and down-putting denigration - an acute lack of self-confidence (the feeling that hits a sky-diver when he jumps and suddenly realizes he forgot to put on his parachute) (back to verse 16) Merriam-Webster Dictionary inchoately afflictive malaise of abulia - you are free to exercise your own will, but you have none, and you can't figure out why, because you only got this way yesterday anomalous quandary, our quag of anomic diffidence - our wierd state of bewilderment over the destruction of our standards and values, but now without any of those, we don't know what to do about it destructively chafing and sorely abrading - a process by which the little things in life wear you down and eventually rub holes in you afflatus - inspiration stiff-lipped estrangement - unemotional seperation (or so you hope it seems) absorptive alienation - aha! you do have feelings about being seperated, and they are overtaking your mind and sucking the life out of you (back to verse 17) Merriam-Webster Dictionary elicits an array of antinomian gymnastics - calls forth all kinds of twisted arguments against what is right false, unfunny facade of levelheaded gumption - your pretense of being wise and sensible, which doesn't make anybody laugh when they find out you're not facile furies - the things that happen when your "I think I'd like to go into a wild rage now" button is too light to the touch font of fussy fusillades - a productive source for the outbursts of criticism that go sailing out of your mouth, but so gently as to prove that you are more worried about being polite than helpful (Rule of Etiquette: when you are destroying someone, make sure you do it politely) hypocritical horror - acting as if you are scared out of your witts, but you aren't withering imputation - an accusation that makes you feel like you've aged 75 years (back to verse 18) Merriam-Webster Dictionary flitting, fluttering and fumbling in a flailing kerfuffle - seeming to move with aimless agitation, in awkward fits of stumbling from one thing to another while swinging one's limbs out of control (the way some ballerinas describe their performance, no matter how beautifully they danced) funambulistic flouncing - trying to find your footing almost as if you are walking a tightrope during an earthquake, or as if you have just gotten out of bed stumping stumblebummery - where you look like you were thrown out of a helicopter into the jungle and now you have a big spider crawling around under your shirt frantically futilitarian flares, flurries, fits and flusters - where, in the frustrating belief that no is listening, you have confused, agitated meltdowns and throw temper tantrums that would make any 2-year-old proud rending rectitudinal flexure and shifting fluctuation - the moral foundaton over which, against your better instincts, you pretend to believe it's okay to do anything you want as long as it feels good (back to verse 19) Merriam-Webster Dictionary propense to deign - being inclined to consider doing something beneath your dignity (such as running for congress) casting of aspersions - saying bad things about someone (not to be confused with casting nosturtiums) passing of glances askance - give quick sideways looks of disapproval discoloration - the negative light you shed on something just to make it look worse than it does in daylight acquiescent silence - silence is assent; in other words, if you ask your teenaged daughter where she's going as she steps out of the house in the middle of the night, and she says, "My boyfriend just escaped from prison. We're going to meet his buddies and blow up the IRS building," and you are too stunned to wake up the neiborhood yelling at her, so you say nothing, you are legally agreeing that the caper is a good idea, and that's how many very surprised people end up in jail as accomplices. idiolectal slams - showing a thoughtless lack of common sense in your use of certain inapropriate speech patterns (such as cursing like a drunken sailor when you're having an audience with the Pope or tea with the Queen) snippy snipes - rude people with short-tempers trying to act like big shots sling stigmatization - saying things like, "Why, that's disgraceful!" or "You had no right to shoot that person!" (back to verse 20) Merriam-Webster Dictionary irregularities of jejune impropriety - mind-numbingly unacceptable departures from civilized norms; my dog's opinion of other dogs being allowed to walk in front of our house disgraceful mots of opprobrious ethical variation - disgusting obscenities using words distinctively unique to their source electrifying effronteries - personal disrespect that makes your hair stand on end, if you have any, as if you had stuck your finger into a light bulb socket moral turpitude - being subject, rather than to higher qualities of mind and spirit, to corrupt and vile things (or in other words, being morally terp) vanguard of actionable legal aberration - the very newest, most up-to-date methods of breaking the law and building new friendships with lawyers, judges and prison guards (back to verse 21) Merriam-Webster Dictionary ochlocracy - mob rule (another term for democracy) supposedly halcyon hyperkinetic habituation to heinously heedless and wholly heathen decadence - when we think we have found happiness through very busily ignoring things we didn't like, such as human decency, and thinking we can always outrun our consciences in the "blissful" enjoyment of depravity convivially cozy, self-coddling collaboration - where, having a fondness for the comforts of life which we can't fully enjoy while we're being inconvenienced by fighting the good fight, we solve the problem by cooperating with the enemy (back to verse 22) Merriam-Webster Dictionary headless hedonism - the doctrine that personal pleasure is the highest good in life, best achieved by ignoring anybody who says otherwise acquiescence - allowing something to happen by doing nothing to stop it exoneration - what you get when they finally figure out you didn't do it after all homologation - official confirmation of whatever story needs to be true at the moment passive ratification - where you formally confirm, or accept, something without having to lift a finger disparate paths of self-excuse in our accreditation - the amazing list of justifications by which we legitamize our ethically corrupt, disgustingly depraved, morally diseased, and otherwise inappropriate, behavior distemperate modes of depravation - where you do things that, being ethically corrupt, disgustingly depraved and morally diseased, are also inappropriate (back to verse 23) Merriam-Webster Dictionary brassy bravado - when you do something stupid just to show how brave you are (like trying to juggle three cats, or disagreeing with your mother-in-law) unbuttoned braggadocio - what a loud-mouthed braggart engages in just before his shirt pops open daunting dint of Dionysian debauchery - the frightful power that gets worked up in an orgiastic frenzy of enough immoral fun to make your legs wobble attitudinized affinities of hasty approbation, if not unapologetically apoplectic promulgation - where, like crazed sheep, we all quickly decide it's embarrassing to approve of, if not give ourselves a stroke from wildly cheering for, just another half-baked piece of nonsense (back to verse 24) Merriam-Webster Dictionary swamps of sewerly slop and swill - situations that stink like the slop you would find in a sewer ditsy delectation - goofy enjoyment routing - beating someone quite thoroughly in a contest disastrously dizzying devaluation, through higgledy-piggledy daily deformation, of civilization - a gravely bewildering decline in life as we know it (back to verse 25) Merriam-Webster Dictionary haplessly hamstrung - having the bad luck to be rendered powerless haggard - looking like a wreck harried - annoyed by a great many more problems than you would prefer to have at the moment hampered, harassed - feeling restricted from doing what you want (like having to behave yourself to avoid being charged with contempt of court) hung, hassled and hectored - plagued, pestered and poked phylogenetic phase - a normal stage in the development of something (as in society, for example, when people start bringing guns to church) unseeing gaze on impending incapacitation - when you are looking but can't see that you are about to be disabled (like, for example, when you decide to stand up on a roller-coaster) (back to verse 26) Merriam-Webster Dictionary carelessly cruise and carouse - go on the lookout for degrading ways to have fun, with complete disregard for life and limb careening - lurching and swaying from side to side as you go merrily along (some of us do this just walking down the sidewalk) functional cessation - when, finally, you have become good for nothing (as naturally happens to parents when their children enter their teens) clearly unkenningly, we court a collective calamity - without understanding, we act as if we want to bring disaster upon ourselves (what voters often do on election day) rue - regret and sorrow (what voters are often made to feel soon after election day) rack - a cause of anguish or pain (what elected officials often give to voters, hoping there's enough time before the next election for the voters to forget) rancid relegation - assignment to a place of distasteful insignificance or oblivion (what they do to you when bosses discover that you are more competant than they are) (back to verse 27) Merriam-Webster Dictionary old proverbial landfill; the dustheap of history - that imaginary garbage dump filled with the stories of once-important people like kings, presidents, leaders of armies and navies, inventors, philosophers, artists, musicians, and artificially bald parents of teenagers imbroglio of turbid entanglement in embarrassing flirtation with uncurbed carnal caprice - messy, muddy complications resulting from your decision to experiment freely with popular temptations of crude bodily pleasures and appetites (what teenagers have to explain to parents once they get out of the hospital after their latest party) somber indication of our growing gravitation toward the edge of obliteration - a not very rosy sign that we are being increasingly attracted to the threshhold of utter destruction (back to verse 28) Merriam-Webster Dictionary speeding centrifugation - what happens when you are on a merry-go-round going way too fast to hold on apathetic nescience - not caring about not knowing; being obstinately and wilfully stupid dumps of decimation - how you might feel after the earth is sucked into a black hole (back to verse 29) Merriam-Webster Dictionary down-home drubbing of unprecedented despair - a simple, straightforward beating over the head with more hopelessness than you've ever known subliminal hot Hades of drudging dilapidation - where you don't realize it, but you are in a special hell of monotonous decay and increasing ruin potential depilation in dry dystopian deserts of dysphoric deformity and detracting derogation - a desolate and forbidding place in the mind that fills you with such fear that you could quickly go bald, where you keep hearing the question, "How did I get into this mess?" and where you feel especially sick about being morally defective, aesthetically flawed and just generally inadequate (the way performing artists often feel before, during and after their performances) (back to verse 30) Merriam-Webster Dictionary teary drought of promise and incurable disrelation - a prolonged shortage of good things, plus a hopeless lack of friends, but otherwise, not so bad undoing by dolor and disrelishable desiccation - like a bad hangover on top of your clinical depression nidus - the place where it all begins presage - intuition about the future (so that, for example, if you decide to give in and start letting your dog drive the car, you will always sit next to him and have him on a leash, so it won't look so bad when the nice police officer pulls you over) distinctly irremeable, contortive exacerbation - the twisting of things so far out of shape that you'll never get them straight again (back to verse 31) Merriam-Webster Dictionary petty little namby-pamby epicyclical episode - a smaller process within a larger one (such as getting your necktie caught in the paper shredder when you are in the larger process of preparing for a visit from the grand jury) lean little kink of ephemeral irk and irritation - the small, insignificant event which at first makes you want to commit murder, but you get over it cagey game of charades based on moonstruck denial - the crafty mind-games you play in order to maintain your residence in la-la-land despite all the things you see and hear that cause normal people to run screaming lunkheaded perplexity - where your best explanation for what is happening is "Huh?" or more eloquently, "Say what??" inexplicable exasperation - when you are extremely annoyed but can't figure out why, or in other words, the reason cannot be explicked (back to verse 32) Merriam-Webster Dictionary real doozy, a humdinger of apocalyptic bust - a real whopper of total collapse on a scale foreshadowing universal doom and destructon (like when your computer crashes) bottomless barranca - an unfathomably deep gully with steep sides that make it seem even deeper specter of Armageddon - a horrible image of open jaws that are about to consume you (like when your boss opens his mouth to say something), but in this case it's merely an image of crucial conflict that results in catastrophic annihilation global Gotterdammerung - where the whole world falls apart in violence and disorder (just like an office Christmas party) over-the-cliff katzenjammer - a state of life-threatening distress (what your dog thinks he's going through when he watches you eat) unmitigated miff mixed with febrile frustration - an all out, unadulterated, super-deluxe, triple-whamy temper tantrum where, this time, you are literally hot under the coller (back to verse 33) Merriam-Webster Dictionary wistfully wandering wayward, wild and willingly willy-nilly - milling around like an audience leaving a concert hall, having been assaulted by some award-winning composer's latest piece for ten kazoos, five piccolos and a tuba tracts of human wilderness - modern urban jungles, just as bewildering and dangerous as untamed regions ruled by animals who sustain themselves by eating each other self-whittling wonder - when something is so awesomely mysterious that it causes you enough astonishment to tear away little pieces of what you thought was your mind until you no longer have one eerie moonscapes of hypnopompic speculation - where you might as well be walking alone on the moon, engaged in the kind of semi-conscious, aimless thinking you do while deciding whether it's worth it to get up in the morning (back to verse 34) Merriam-Webster Dictionary nonchalantly pococurante, we finally come to unwittingly ape - where with a complete lack of concern, we find ourselves (for example) accidentally acting as stupid as members of the opposing political party in an election year pyrotechnical pandemonium of stampeding pismires - ants running together in such feverish chaos that they seem likely to explode or burst into flames defining incuriosity, we make an imprudent procession - when your particular lack of interest is one of the most exciting things in your life, and your resulting plans are outstandingly ill-advised, you nevertheless march forward incommodiously peppy parade - a big showy procession which would be much easier for you to tolerate if everyone wasn't so full of energy and high spirits acephalous peregrination - a leaderless mob on the move (hopefully no torches, pitch forks, pointed white hoods, or empty nooses) (back to verse 35) Merriam-Webster Dictionary primly pruned primrose path - a course of sensual conduct, neatly trimmed of all bothersome inhibitions, such as common sense precise and prissy promenade - taking a walk where you can show off how refined and delicate you are in terms of grooming and fashion, although not necessarily in your behavior decluttered and well-buttered chute down to the transpiration of a prelusive epitasis - since scientists have discovered that the quickest way to go down a slide, or a chute, is to cover it with butter and be sure there is no junk on it to crash into, this has become your speedy slide of choice into the part of the drama where everything is about to explode into catastrophe, but it's only the beginning of something even worse (where all the weeping and wailing really happens) trendy spiritual suicide - a currently fashionable way to comit the opposite of traditional suicide where the body dies but the spirit continues to live forever, whereas in this case, the spirit dies while the body continues to live, at least for the time being circus of self-desecration - the shameful mockery you are happy to make of yourself (back to verse 36) Merriam-Webster Dictionary hotly motly vastitude of variegated lechery - an almost immeasurably wide variety of lewd, lustful activities to keep you from being bored expansive attractions of lascivious incontinence - the ever increasing variety of crimes that your wandering hands are driven into by raw animal lust unhinderedly - without opposition absurdly siren - unexplainably enticing perilous imminence of ignominious self-immolation - how dangerously close we are to the embarrassment of throwing ourselves onto a blazing funeral pyre of earthly desires (back to verse 37) Merriam-Webster Dictionary uneducably libidinous callosity - where having rendered your conscience numb, you are hopelessly hardened in your desires to do naughty things paucity of any pensive equiponderation - where you don't need to meditate just to keep your head on straight inducer of infuriation - that which makes us want to breath fire molto crescendo of cacophonic cachinnation - a huge increase in the volume of ugly laughing (what you might hear from behind the closed doors of the Public Works Commission as they decide which city streets would be the most fun to dig large holes in, again) (back to verse 38) Merriam-Webster Dictionary creepy concoction of cold crapulous crassitude - a weird collection of things that are disgustingly gross (like rancid fruitcake) occult cabalas - mysterious arts (like making sense of the U.S. Tax Code) thermogenic cauldrons - large, very hot kettles that seem to produce their own heat heaving voluptuosity - your brain throbbing with thoughts of sensual gratification, and pulsating imaginations of carnal ecstasy, which when they accidentally happen at the same time, threaten to make your brain explode (which is why you should always wear a tight hat when you are getting frisky) steamy provocation - hot, sensual temptation (back to verse 39) Merriam-Webster Dictionary ransack, rifle and raven - to pillage and plunder and greedily feed upon something (like your birthday cake before your party guests arrive) slimy sludge - gooey glop that is mucky, yucky, and gucky passively partaking of the gaudy agglutination - the actually absorbing, simply by doing nothing to stop it, all kinds of tastelessly dazzling, extravagantly stupid offerings (such as watching an evening of network television) monstrous cornucopia of cyclopean quantification - the vast abundance of things that are extremely over-blown no matter how you measure them, considering you do that with only one eye half-closed instead of both eyes wide open kaleidoscopic Babel of titanic temptation - a confusing parade of ideas that make you want to go out and do things you'll be sorry for (back to verse 40) Merriam-Webster Dictionary pack a pitiful profit from the prideful prodigality of those overactive engines driving the profluent profligacy - to take other people's money as a public service to help them refrain from proudly wasting it on thieving schemes based on wild immorality through unbridled self-indulgence imbrues the knotty nub, the nasty net, the nettlesome nodus - leaves your own stain on the essence of what is already the most irritatingly complicated part of a problem growing, glowing inferno of fear and ontological perturbation - what happens when everything we think we know about something seems to get turned upside down in a proverbial nuclear explosion of confusion (back to verse 41) Merriam-Webster Dictionary - Babylonian bacchanal of protean perversity - a wild orgy of bad behavior pandemic bash of irrepressible promiscuity - a big party where the invited guest list includes the whole human race, and nobody cares how, when, where, why, or with whom, they misbehave, just as long as no one tries to stop them flighty but flightlessly farcical festival - a goofy, uncentered celebration of laughable stupidity, which accomplishes nothing and gets us nowhere because that's how the boss organized the company party fiendish, feverishly infectious inebriation - where you think you're having fun, but of course you really aren't, because you've merely worked yourself into a mindless frenzy, and now you're working others into the same mindless frenzy, so that soon everyone will be in a mindless frenzy thinking they are having fun (which is why many people drink) (back to verse 42) Merriam-Webster Dictionary most brummagem, conceitedly kooky chimera, this - an idea that come sinto your head and inflates your ego past the point of realizing that it's really pretty stupid contemptible course of coarsely constrictive divination - detestible insights that lead you all over the place but make you afraid of everything laid open, ubjected to visionless evaluation, - proving that when it comes to judging the worth of things, you would rather not be confused by the facts (back to verse 43) Merriam-Webster Dictionary threat of correlation (by significant shrinkage through paedomorphic retardation - presenting the dangers of conforming and getting along when it means dumbing yourself down to keep characteristics you had when you were young and stupid assailably arenaceous foundation of gnosis, common sense and cognitive registration - with all due respect, the flimsy basis for your spiritual understanding of existence, and even the way you processes information, which for you comes exclusively through your outward senses, and thus you are built on nothing firmer than sand (back to verse 44) Merriam-Webster Dictionary ruddy ruse - wily subterfuge, or in English, a clever trick spin - a way of shading or framing the facts so that something bad for you now looks good, or something good for the other guy now looks bad garrulous loquacity - where you ramble on and on about trivialities, and the more you say, the less it means selective report - the way you intend for your story to sound when you pretend to tell us exactly what happened (the process by which we are fed tainted information from professional hipocrits, liars, and crooks) relativistic rationalization - when you excuse your behavior according to which particular set of morals works best for you this time around hosed and hypnotized in benumbing dissimulation - tricked and overwhelmed into a sleep-like state where our dubious bonding gets increasingly deep the more of us there are, and our lies are so bare-faced that people grow numb to the itchiness of the wool we're pulling over their eyes (back to verse 45) Merriam-Webster Dictionary laws of reciprocity in the sudorific expectation - the principle by which you know you'll get what's coming to you as it effects your sweat-inducing dread of a particular eventuality rascally wreaking of wreckage - your cute little impish manner of rampaging through people's lives leaving a trail of destruction and ruin ineludibly ineluctable reaping of an unrehearsably unhallowed harvest - where, for doing things you should be ashamed of, you can count on being amply rewarded, which will make you even better able to do things you should be even more ashamed of, but it's inescapably unavoidable that God'll get you for it rightly redolent of karmic wrath, right-minded rebuke and damnation - a reminding stench that what goes around comes around (back to verse 46) Merriam-Webster Dictionary garnered by gleaning garbaceous gaggles of glop - collected from all the stinky and disgusting memories of your life immaterial, moldering masses of meretricious chaff - a gigantic invisible pile of human intelligence neverthelss curdling into a blob of sludge composed of mental rot dreck, dregs, dross and detritus - junk, as it's known by those with large vocabularies obstruent guerdon - a supposed reward which will hang around your neck like a millstone, or a deceased albatross if you'd rather expediential miscomputation - the mistake you made because all the pressure sent you into a panic and your calculations were based on immediate needs instead of the bigger picture (back to verse 47) Merriam-Webster Dictionary stinky, smoldering trash - horrible smelling, slow-burning rubbish, like, for example fresh fish guts left in a closed garbage can on a hot summer day aromatically moldy mash - smelly ingredients all smooshed together in hot water (reminiscent of a stew made from vinegar-marinated goat livers in a base of fresh camel dung steeped in fermented eggplant juice) malodorous - improperly reeking waves of flowery, pompous language that somehow actually sounds like it represents the rudiments of intelligent thought, but it doesn't; this is what you get whenever corrupt politicians (pardon the redundancy) see a microphone and a camera pruritically prurient - where the intensity of your lust makes you itch (back to verse 48) Merriam-Webster Dictionary "Lizard-Brained" portions - the primitive part of your brain, your limbic cortex, which feeds the lower, less evolved areas of your mind (the entire mind for some people) psychic tumultuary - a place in the mind ruled by riot, lawless confusion and impetuosity (where many people, like violent criminals and government officials, do all their thinking) germinal phantom eidolons, phony bogeys, of dastardly design - the very beginnings of cowardly imaginings which lead to the acting out of underhanded treachery (what most company bosses and corporate CEOs thought and giggled about when they were babies) criminal, acts of really wrongful glandular gratification - the horrible things you do to other people just to make yourself feel good PAGE 2 Verses 49 - 105 PAGE 3 / PAGE 4 / PAGE 5 / PAGE 6 Home / My Own Music and Writing