Life of Wry

One can still sit outside at a sidewalk cafe, keep warm with a frothy-hot cafe au lait, and read. Which I totally did! Enjoyed a real break today from my usual pandemic- and politics-focused days by reading a short story (not so short) written by kindergarten pal and dinosaur aficionado Jeff Levy.

He’s a fun writer and I’m enjoying the story so far about his exploits on a trip to Mexico some thirty years ago. Like I said, a real departure from where my head’s been the last umpteen months.

I also enjoyed reading the below — something he shared on Facebook yesterday — speaking of writing.

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

I Googled the above, hoping to find whom to credit.. but couldn’t find a definitive source. In my brief search, I found comment threads where people have added to this list (oh, so cleverly).

Also: I’m pretty sure I violate a good number of those things. It does make me wish I were a better writer. Not to mention more well read, more knowledgable about history, philosophy and literature… and on and on. Makes me just wanna spend my days reading and writing.

Which takes me right back to how nice it was to escape the daily dread and just spend an hour outside on a gorgeous fall day and read about somebody’s misadventures in Mexico.