In My Mind

Someone once recently told me that they like writers who input anecdotes into their work. You know, little autobiographical snippets.

In my perfect world, there would be no pennies. I have pennies; more pennies than anyone really needs. The ash tray in my car is overflowing with these little pieces of copper and I find it disturbingly annoying that when I need a quarter, all I can seem to come up with is a handful of these rotton one-cent pieces. And that makes my mind sit on the saying "I'll put my two cents in." Really, lets think together on this one. What can two cents get you? Nothing. No phone booth, candy dispenser, vending maching, or parking meter will take them. I don't even think that the machines at the laundromat take them! So what does it really mean to put your two cents in? Sure, the saying means that you will give your opinion on something, but who wants an opinion that can't get you anything worthwhile except a pocketful of useless change? And if you put in your two cents, and I put in mine, we're still left with only four cents which is one cent short of a nickel and that still won't get you shit! Now, if you were to say that you would put your three cents in, then fine, I would probably put up less of an argument because then we would have five cents, and at least that would get us a few short minutes on a parking meter.


When I was a little tyke, I used to think about where words came from. I was unnaturally curious about who named what, and why. For instance, I would look around the room and wonder the name of the guy that decided to call the thing under my butt a 'chair.' And I'd wonder what his thought process was and why he chose to call that a chair, instead of something else, like a pineapple. I used to imagine a group of about fifteen men with old fashioned wigs and dusty black suits sitting around a wooden oval table in a room lined with shelves holding every object that could be found on earth. They were cocky, and important men, smoking smelly tobacco out of wooden pipes with their feet propped up on the finished mahogany. They all talked in thick british accents. There was a definite leader; he was the older man at the head of the table with the bushiest eyebrows I could imagine. He would tell one of the men to pull an item off the shelf and place it in the middle of the table. "What shall this be called?" he would ask in a commanding voice, demanding resonable suggestions. They would all squint and stare at it. Some of them would close their eyes and play with their beards while others sucked on their smoking piece. "How about we call it bicycle?" one would offer. "No, no. That doesn't fit at all! I think it looks more like it should be named a wildebeest." Soon enough, the men would be arguing back and forth, accomplishing nothing until the leader would shout and swear, forcing a decision. In the corner of the room, I always pictured a skinny and frazzled man with circular eyeglasses, holding a feather pen with a book as thick and as solid as a slab of marble resting on his tired lap. He would draw the object from the middle of the table in his book and scribble down the agreed upon name, watching out for any duplicates. And this was how all the words in the entire dictionary came about in my six year old mind.