there are times when a single person's thoughts crystallize our moment in time. when that happens, we are compelled to run it front-page as the ...

Commentary.
by Joel Kilmer, owner, Kilmer's DrugStore

Mojo City, Jan 28, 2009 - I was standing out by the fence this late afternoon watching the dark grey of the storm clouds building. Perhaps they were kind of like that four-horsemen-of-the-apocalypse thing ... a sense of impending doom, misfortune, danger ...

I suddenly became very angry. My hands clenched at the fence, tightening, releasing. My mouth grimaced, my jaw muscles contracted. Furious. And it was because I suddenly realized that all those people who had all those years to develop words that had real meaning and meat to them have failed us.

I give you just two examples.

The first ... there is a word, "onomatopoeia." It means, when a word sounds like the thing it is. The word "splash" is a good example. The word sounds like the event it's tagged to. Splash.

But does onomatopoeia sound like anything? Hell, no. It could have been so lovely. We could have called it an "llllllllllll." Just a tongue running long "l" sounds so that it kind of feels furry. Or, better, we could have called it an "alike." So that a splash is an alike. Alike a splash sound. You know?

Now on to the second example ... palindrome. This is a word that describes a sentence that is the same backwards as it is forwards. Here's an example I lifted from the Web, "A nut for a jar of tuna." Same forwards as it is backwards.

Here's palindrome spelled backwards ... emordnilap.

Is your blood boiling now? Yeah. I thought so. They could have found a word that's the same backwards and forwards.

I vote for "poop."

With that last line written, I suddenly feel lighter. More happy.

I win.

-30-

This might look like a palindrome on first glance, but it isn't. It's a psychological test to see how stuck you are in this so-called reality we all share. Can you even consider going forward by choosing the arrow to the left? Are you tempted to click on the right-hand arrow to go forward, even with the word "backwards" saying that's wrong? What does that say about all the ways we've been trained to make our way through this world? Straying from the path laid out for us by others can be incredibly difficult. Creativity is hard to hold on to.

Commentary. by Joel Kilmer, owner, Kilmer's DrugStore

Commentary.
by Joel Kilmer, owner, Kilmer's DrugStore