Today I was looking for a certain word to describe something else, something about social media, but that is not really important. Anyway, all I had was the idea and D and R were over and so I asked them for help. I said, "So you know how you are at the beach and you go in the water and it is shallow and then suddenly it drops down? What is that called when it does that?" They couldn't think of the word. I said, "What is it? What is it?"I momentarily turned the kitchen floor into a beach and demonstrated hoping that somehow a mime performance would help. I said, "Okay, so your kids are going into the ocean and what do you say? "What do you tell them to be careful of? ""There is no word," they insisted. Then we talked about other things which if they had been formal lectures instead of meandering conversations would have had titles like, "Psychological Diagnosis of Self, Friends, and Relatives for the Lay Person" and "Why Sleep is Still a Good Idea For Tired People," "Texting: A Sociological Phenomenon of Instantaneous Regret" and "The One to Five Time Use of LSD in Young Adulthood: A Case for The Necessary Introduction of Reality Expansion Beyond Suburbia". Then we listened to some music and had coffee. Then I yelled out, "The word is drop!" "What is?" they asked. "The thing," I said. "The word, when it drops down, it is called a drop." R didn't hear me because he was running the garbage disposal which he had suddenly made work a few minutes before when it had previously not been working. Somehow he'd done this using a shish kebob skewer that I didn't remember ever having before that moment. He'd said, "Do you have something long and pointy?" And there it was out of nowhere in the silverware drawer. D said, "I don't think that's what it is called? Why would it be called a drop?" Then we both realized simultaneously that in her mind's eye she'd seen a lozenge, like a cough drop but then she changed it to the drop I meant and then R sort of caught up with what was happening, but he was still thinking about the LSD discussion and it seemed like drop in that context, as a word was almost some kind of linguistically multi-leveled weird acid thing in itself. I mean does drop acid mean that the acid is a drop? Which kind? Both? Then that thing happened whereby when you focus too intensely on a particular word it starts to lose its meaning, like when you get too close to something it looks blurry. I think it is so strange that the same thing happens with meaning and a word as with an object and one's eyes. I remembered binoculars right then. My parents had had these huge heavy ones. When they were not actually held up to one's eyes they were like an obscene necklace, like a sculptural interpretation of the albatross idiom, an idiomatic idiom, almost iconic really, but not quite. And then I just mentally backed away from the word and I realized that yes, yes, it was true. Drop was and is the word for when the ocean floor drops down. It can be a thrilling experience when a verb is also a noun for the thing and the action. It is kind of like acid for the adult who is well past his or her twenties. Well, sort of. And this would be the end of this little story which has ended up not being so little after all, but there was this 2nd part or 3rd part, a part after whichever part we're on. It is very late so I've lost track of what parts are parts and what are sub-parts. But, after the universal agreement that drop was indeed the word, my son came downstairs with D's son and they said, "Do you want to see something cool we just learned about on the computer?" "Sure," we said." And they showed us this thing called "Google Gravity." Have you seen it? It takes all the words and images on your screen and makes them all drop down, like rain drops, like falling snow. It looks like your monitor or laptop has been picked up and shaken. It blew our minds. Way trippy day.
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