Storytime Time

...I wanted to tell a story.  Yep, a story about a story.   Not a nuanced title.  Literately.  So I reached into my bag of gooey pink and gray convoluted neuro material and pulled out this guide: How to write a story about stories.  Well that wasn’t really the title but I guessed from scanning the pages that’s what it’s about.  It about knowhow.  For those who don’t. No.  HOW!

Howdy.  How’s the name.  How’s the game!  How’s about to blow your mind, by telling you the long and short of it - the roundabouts way such that a name like “How” could be given to me.  Given, given, given..... no, it’s not my given name.  I used to be called “Jimmothy”.  Or “Tames” for short.  Not the river, the one that meets up with the Danube and the Euphrates on the way to the sea.  It was a pretty epic name, I’ll give you that!  But as things go, sooner or later it was bound to grow - or shrink, technically.  You don’t have to let that sink in.

Sometimes a good natured stranger will offer up the obligatory, the obvious, “How’d ya get a name like How anyhow???”  And I just have to stare in wonder at the sheer ... sheerness of that.  “How?  How? Well, I’ll tell you just between you and me, the name’s A-How-a-do-ya-annser-a-Kwes-Chun.

And if you want to call me “Do Ya” or “Annser-A” or “Kwes” we’re easy like butter.  But just don’t call me a “Mr. Chun” - that’s my pops.

So that’s the smart answer to a stupid enough um, inquiry.  I really don’t know.  But somehow I muddle my way through.  Truth is, though, there’s a story there, and there’s another one here and there, and there’s certainly a story waaaaay over there, if you’re looking for it.

And you might tell yourself some good ones on the way, down the path and o’er the hillsides and pasteur.

The method by which you arrive is about as fixed as the groove in a metro tram rail.  And it’s a good thing, because iffin tweren’t, you might trip on the path and your legs would do the talking instead of your ahem, storytelling muscle.  And that’s not good for you or any other of the passengers.

The reason I tell you this is to prepare you, for the shock, the shock that I felt - the day I got my name.  It was a re-awakening.  That day, the story was in the air.  The sky was talking, the tall grasses were conversing it up with the winds sweeping through them, the birds were singing in the trees like the trees were listening.  But I know for a fact they weren’t - cos they could not keep their trunks shut!  

On a day like that, everything and every ONE knows.  Such and such a way.

And it was that day that I lost my head, pushing so hard from the distraction of loose metanoids and subplutonics.  You ever see that diagram of how the screws un-swivel whilst the nuts-and-the-bolts straight “pop-off” like they were temporary?  I thought that was gonna be, thought that was gonna be it.  For certain.  That’s how my head felt.  Like there was half a player-piano sticking-out propped-up by a typewriter, and neither one could pluck the other.

I needed to be reminded, that the story of a story is the reason, the real reason, the raison d’etre.

“But why’d ya have to end it like that for?  All mellow-and-dramatic like?  What happened to the nice man that gave you back your sense of be-wonder-ment ???