On Synergy and Sound

My name is Chris, and I have an addiction, not to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, or prescription pharmaceuticals, but to music. The shaking of air as melody, harmony, and rhythm is one of the primary ways in which I experience the divine, a portal through which to glimpse the eternal; music stimulates my imagination almost instantly and speaks to that part of my spirit that dreams of heaven. And in this age of information, how fortunate that we should enjoy the ability to have music digitally enshrined in compact discs, iPods, and other media that allow for perennial accessibility with almost no generation loss. And yet, while media such as the commercial record, or album, have entered a period of either ensuing or latent obsolescence, I still

The Discipline of Dentistry

In the first act of the macabre rock musical Little Shop of Horrors, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman inserted one of off-Broadway’s most side-splitting numbers in which the character Orin Scrivello begins by revealing the sadistic childhood thrills that led his mother to believe him uniquely suited for maybe the most contemptible of all professions, the mad science, civilization’s most abject excuse for personhood. In short, he became a dentist. Specifically, he sings of his “talent for causing things pain,” and despite his patients’ distress, they “pay him to be inhumane.” Seriously, the song is hilarity itself, and highlights a cultural aversion too common for a single ounce of the satire to be misunderstood. Somehow everyone gets the joke. And why? Because all dentists are sadists, of course. Is it even a true satire to begin with, or merely an exaggerated refraction of the truth? In light of my own blatant love of satire, let me offer that

Twelve Angry Words

As the current idiomatic heritage is passed to posterity, there seems a strong tendency not only to withhold correction, but also to bestow complete approbation and to characterize a blunder in speech as simply a respectable mode of expression or reflection of individuality, as opposed to a true, genuine, and wholly incorrect screw-up. The blooper reel of the human mind is certainly full of these, and for sure, there’s no shame in that, though I fear certain words may not survive the massacre of language that occurs today with alarmingly rare objection. In the years since I came of age and took to heart the subtleties of accurate usage, the beauty of language, and the true eloquence revealed by those who craft their manner of expression with care and conscience, these are a few of the words that have stood out to me (or perhaps whose ruin has just left me personally the most peevish), twelve with good reason to be irate, for they are the orphaned and abused, living in the foxholes of the English lexicon. They are linguistic piñatas, continually thrashed in the mosh pit of mental laziness by members of nearly every social stratum. Perhaps I put too much

Embracing the Murse

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man, regardless of fashion sense, staunch enthusiasm for preparedness, or rigid will to ignore social convention, may not reasonably endeavor, by any acceptable standard, however alternatively framed with respect to history or tradition, to carry a bag in ordinary society, for in so doing, his appearance, mannerisms, and movement so closely resemble that of the opposite sex that the humor harvested by ridiculing him never seems to lose its flavor. In modern times, many lines can now be crossed that were, in previous eras, impassable to one or the other gender. Of course, the male practice of carrying a purse is hardly novel. And yet, in the annals of social more, there seems to have been a point at which the paraphernalia of the average guy was deemed pervasively negligible or less burdensome than that of the average gal. For me, the appeal is one of utility. As a young man, I found myself constantly forgetting things; I happen to have been “cursed” with a somewhat uncooperative memory and a mind prone to wandering, neither of which is conducive to being prepared, comfortable, or prompt.