Tag Archives: Metaphor

Really Bad Metaphors (part 2)

Posted on by
1

This is part two in my multifaceted series of really really bad metaphors making absolutely no valuable point whatsoever. So without further adieu…a really poor illustration for life:

When me and my sisters were little my grandma always instructed us to not let the dog lick us. Dogs have dirty mouths of course. She did, however, have one alternative–one way in which dog licking was always aceptable–one way in which she actually encouraged dog licking to happen. “You can let the dog lick your ear as much as you want.” This wasn’t a joke, it wasn’t a tricky way to keep the kids from receiving dog licks. No, she was serious. And so were we. I spent much of my childhood trying to get a dog to lick my ear.

Don’t we all want to have our ear licked by a dog? Imagine in this illustration that you are me, that your ear represents your heart, the dog represents your father, and the tongue represents his love…No, wait, you’re me, the ear is your fear, the dog is God, and the tongue is the BIble…No, that’s not it…hmm…

Just like trying to get my childhood ear licked by my grandma’s dog so too we often spend much of our life trying to get our ears licked by dogs…no, that’s not right either…

Turns out there’s no metaphor or illustration here…turns out my grandma was just a bit crazy and my sisters and I looked just a bit awkward.

Really Bad Metaphors (hopefully a four part series)

Posted on by
1

I’m thinking it’d be fun to write random posts that are plain and simply really really bad metaphors making absolutely no valuable point whatsoever. Turns out it’s a bit harder than I first thought! So without further adieu…a really poor illustration for life:

I’ve put on about 40 pounds since this whole cancer thing started. Most of it is water weight due to taking steroids. Some of it is actual fat due to inactivity. Regardless I found that it came quite in handy while snorkeling. Turns out I can’t sink. No, seriously, I was so buoyant that as hard as I would try I couldn’t possibly swim three feet below the water. So there I floated for about two hours looking at sea creatures of all kinds. I could barely walk in the water due to the manner in which my legs work/don’t work (we liked to say that I looked like a toddler pretending to be a clown) but boy could I snorkel!

Buoyancy.

Sometimes all we want in life is a little buoyancy. Often times we feel as though we’re walking through life like a toddler pretending to be a clown–stagering and stammering as we swear everyone around us is watching and smirking. Maybe we stammer because we got cancer in our spine that made our legs not work…or maybe we stammer because we drank too much the night before. Regardless, we look awkward, like Jack Sparrow on a tilt a whirl or child who’s dad spun him too fast on the merry go round. If only we could float. If only we could fly. If only we could soar high above the water that causes us to fall. If only.

The answer is simple: drugs. Not drugs in a literal sense, but metaphorically. We all need to be drugged out in life so that we can gain a little weight and thus become more buoyant so we can float above our problems and view the wildlife below. So drink the Koolaid, pick your drug of choice…and may I suggest the drug of love? It’s a pretty good one and I hear it causes havoc on the waistline.