Saturday, March 10, 2018

WORDS ARE HARD

Back in the day, barbershops used to be run by grumpy old men in pale blue smocks and signet rings, and not by top-knotted hipsters in $100 flannel shirts. One thing you’d be sure to find, among the ashtrays and the paneling and the copies of Playboy hidden under the Sports Illustrateds, was a tall glass container filled with a blue liquid, in which a number of combs would be soaking like little black plastic embryos in the laboratory of a hygiene-obsessed mad scientist. It was called Barbicide. Today, as I walked through town, the Town Hall clock was chiming the nine o’clock hour at 9:06, as it does. A hole in the clouds opened up and revealed a patch of blue sky, so suddenly that it actually startled me. It’s been so grey and dreary for so many days that an unexpected patch of clear blue sky was almost a shock to the system, albeit a pleasant one. The writer in me always likes to think about moments like those while they are happening, dreaming up ways of describing what I am seeing so that the reader can see what I see. Describing colors is hard. I mean, how do you describe yellow, or make the reader visualize the exact shade of red that you’re thinking of? So I looked up at that island of blue in the midst of a sea of clouds the color of grimy snow, and tried to think of how I would describe it. I’ve used up all the low-hanging fruit already when it comes to blue references: faded denim, Tiffany gift boxes, the newly opened eyes of a kitten. I thought of comparing it to the blue of the Virgin’s robes in a medieval fresco, but that would be 100% derivative of Christopher Moore’s “Sacre Bleu”. The only other thing I could think of as I stared into that blotch of glorious blue, was Barbicide. At that moment I began to feel like a jeweler who has been handed an uncut stone, say a 3-carat Burmese ruby with a huge flaw which renders it unusable. Such wasted potential. But how do you use a Barbicide reference in any readable way? “The sky revealed a brilliant patch of Barbicide blue?” No, it sounds way too toxic, or else like a crime of some kind. “The clouds parted, and the sky showed itself in a defiant blue the color of that blue liquid at the barbershop with the combs in it.” No- just, no. “I saw the patch of blue sky, and immediately I was transported to the smells of shaving cream and Winstons, to out-of-date calendars and baseball on the TV set.” No, just sounds like I’m having an acid flashback. So, I guess I’ll just take that 3-carat ruby and stick it up on the shelf for now. Pretty but useless.

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