the blog quebecois

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has been suffering for the last year and a half with something called Spasmodic Dysphonia. It rendered him incapable of everyday speech. (Oddly, it didn't prevent him from making public speeches, or singing. This resembles, in a way, some people like country star Mel Tillis, who has a severe stutter that entirely disappears when he's onstage.) He has found that speaking in rhyme for a short while enables him, at least temporarily, to speak normally.

He explains it better than I can on his excellent blog.

I do believe I've found my lobster woman (scroll down or click here) or her identical twin sister. It looks like advertising for a patent medicine called Rex's Kidney & Liver Bitters, an alcohol-based remedy with doubtless hints of laudanum/cocaine/morphine, etc, sold at the turn of the last century. Still don't know what that has to do with a lobster in her bed, but she was probably too stoned to notice.

You may or may or may not see it coming, but it doesn't really matter. You're not going to have time to react. Because a bullet can travel at speeds exceeding 3200 feet per second, which is too fast to duck or yell or plead. Hang in there. Taking a cap to the dome means that it will be over faster than a fatal wound anywhere else.

I can't figure out for the life of me what triggered this article. But all those good things you've heard? Fuggetaboutit.