Words and Thoughts: Blue Goofballs, Ahoy!

Hello again, alleged readers!  Sometimes I think I want to say “Hi, alleged readers”, but then I chicken out. Perhaps someday. In the meantime, hello! Again. Well, again again now. Greetings are such an interesting concept. It’s like: I see that you’re there, you see that I’m here, we must now speak in order to acknowledge one another, lest we violate all manner of social norms.

I suppose greetings make sense on the phone, otherwise both parties might just sit there, breathing into the abyss, until one party just decides to start in on whatever is on their mind.

Did you know that ol’ Alex Bell there wanted us to say, “Ahoy” when we answered the phone. Even if the phone was not on a boat.

What an absolute goofball.

Ahoy.

Whenever I call my neighbor with the boat, while he’s on the boat, to tell him I’m stuck in his garage again (which always happens when he moves the boat out of the driveway because it no longer blocks the window I use to get into his garage), he never answers “Ahoy”. Even though he is on a boat.

I don’t think he’s big on greetings though, because every time he gets back, and opens the garage to let me out, he almost never says “Hello”. I’m not offended though; and the freezie-pops in the garage freezer are worth the trouble regardless.

Blue freezie-pops especially. Big fan of the flavor, “blue”.

Imagine if blue things that don’t taste like “blue”, did taste like “blue”. It’d be a different world, I tell you what. What if there are things that do actually taste like “blue”, but we just don’t know it?  To help with this investigation, I can provide a list of things that I know, for a fact, are blue, but do not taste like “blue”:

• Windex
• Windshield Washer Fluid (Isn’t this just how you would describe Windex?  Yet here we are all knowing that Windex and Windshield Washer Fluid are two unique things.)
• Several blue shirts I’ve seen people wearing
• Racquetball balls

There are at least several more things that are blue, however. So, hope remains that we might yet find something that we didn’t expect to taste “blue”, does!

Y’know what’s wild?  If I say, “racquetball”, you’d think I was talking about the sport. If I want to make it clear that I’m talking about the ball, I’d have to say “racquetball ball”. I don’t think you can say “racquet ball”, because the sport is not “racquet”. Thusly, saying “a racquetball” doesn’t work either. So say, hypothetically, I’m choking on a racquetball ball, I’d have to say something like, “Excuse me! I’m choking on a racquetball ball, can you please administer the Heimlich?” But you’re almost certainly going to think, “did Stav just say, ‘racquetball ball’?  Isn’t that redundant like ‘ATM Machine’?  Or maybe not, because the sport itself is racquetball, and the ball is separate?”  Meanwhile, I’m over here losing consciousness, and the ball doesn’t taste like “blue”. A horrible situation. And by the time you manage to Heimlich the ball out of me like some sort of nerf gun, I’ve turned blue, and the first words out of my mouth to you as I regain consciousness are, “can you see what I taste like real quick?” It’s ridiculous. Now I too, like Alex, come off like a real goofball.

Maybe if I had said, “Ahoy! I’m choking on a racquetball”…