I heard someone say yesterday that we should be careful not to assign ourselves passions; we should sniff around and find them.

I added the sniff around part. I like hound dog metaphors.

Anyway, somewhat relatedly, I took a good picture today. In a photography class, the first of my life. The teacher gave me many assignments during class, and I gave myself many more. Some of them turned out fine, but the photo below is better than fine.

And it was not an assignment. It was part quickness, part accident. It found me.

Little is more impressive in this world than a well-turned dinosaur simile:

Thank you Helen Hunt Jackson.

"In the dark of the dungeon his chains weighed on him like his unfinished story."

Thank you Salman Rushdie.

He clumsily tried to fold her into his arms, a bit like folding a bottom fitted king-size sheet but not getting it right and starting over and getting it wrong again and finally saying oh the hell with it.

The Spectator calls that a "toe-curlingly bad analogy." Andrew Sullivan seems to agree, though he does offer some approval by calling it a "beaut." I'm a less critical audience; I call it metaphorical genius.

As earplugs. As a blindfold. As a nasal clothespin. As loose fitting gloves. Or, probably truest to omitted context, memory as a buzzkill:

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

Thank you Michael Pollan.

The Zocalo editors have assigned me a book called The Googlization of Everything (AND WHY WE SHOULD WORRY) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. As one of the brainwashed billions, I feel myself cringing at the lack of love for the my email service provider. But the man makes some great points (for which I'll be sure to praise him in my forthcoming review). And, more importantly, he has given the world one of the strangest metaphors it has ever known:


Wow, right? 

Gotta love the use of "not unlike," the rarest and spiciest of the simile turns.

This one's for Wiley, a great admirer of fast-twitch suspicion:

Alain de Botton wrote that, referring to a week he spent writing at a desk in the middle of an airport.

Thank you PSFK.

(Note: I'm again and again impressed by the jolts of happiness that good metaphors give me.)

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

John Steinbeck wrote that, two blank pages before chapter 1 of Cannery Row begins.

Been almost a year since I tagged a metaphor on this blog. Clearly I'm not paying enough attention.

Thank you Giuls.

We live in a disassembled pizza. It'd taste better if we put it together and baked it gooey.

Thank you, Alex, for seeing a metaphor and passing it my way. If anyone else ever feels the urge to do that, my email address is jdegrazia at gmail dot com.