200 Bottles

Bottle
Originally uploaded by .Kerri..

I don't remember if it's a fragment of a Gertrude Stein quote or part of my imagination, this directive to "caress the noun." I think of it regarding the appropriation of a common noun to something else it is not commonly associated with. Like how Stein named her poodle Basket. Perhaps all names, for people too, are this way. I think of the word bottle differently since I've lived two years with an insistent black cat named Bottle.

After recently seeing an announcement for Effing Press for the umpteenth time, and being an already established appreciator of their fine work, I began to think about this word and its own renewed insistence into the (at least my personal) vernacular. Maybe it's the spelling, but I no longer hear it as f'ing. Just like a bottle is now also a cat or most anything requiring an inordinate amount of attention, here are some other definitions of effing...

..a burgeoning desire with wet wings
..to rub sand into a deep, wooden casement
..the sound of a door opening in the distance either within or without one's own house
..a box labeled "fragile" that contains only stained band T-shirts
..to succumb to an interest in the dating travails of celebrities in a grocery line
..that point on a main road that exceeds any previously experienced traffic backup
..a midnight showing of Moby Dick (starring Gregory Peck) projected onto the side of a public building
..hearing a song in public for the first time that has only previously been heard while alone in a car traveling at high speed while singing at the top of one's lungs
..the act of typing on a keyboard around/under/over a determinately supine feline
..the occurrence of one's legs going out as though being vacated by a ghost
..waiting for them to return