- flashover: n. the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world.
- aoyaoia: n. a musical flavor found in electric guitar solos that compels you to snarl, squint and bend your spine like a longbow being drawn back to fire a warning shot to your distant ancestors, so they may know that your domestication will not go unavenged.
- apomakrysmenophobia: n. fear that your connections with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss. (oi, minha vida)
- waldosia: n. [Brit. wallesia] a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day. (eu vivo fazendo isso)
- faze-out: n. a mood totally out of sync with everyone else around you, from Friday night pensiveness to heart-to-heart snark, which is a symptom of emotional jet lag—caused by an inflamed suspicion of togetherness in an age of faceless anonymity—a condition whose only known cure is to perform the zombie dance from Thriller while openly weeping, which would effectively crash and reboot the collective vibe.
- deep cut: n. an emotion you haven’t felt in years that you might have forgotten about completely if your emotional playlist hadn’t been left on shuffle—a feeling whose opening riff tugs on all your other neurons like a dog on a leash waiting for you to open the door. (oi, Smiths)
- lethobenthos: n. the habit of forgetting how important someone is to you until you see them again in person, making you wish your day would begin with a “previously on” recap of your life’s various plot arcs, and end with “to be continued…” after those will-they-won’t-they cliffhanger episodes that air just before the show goes back into months of repeats.
- kodachronos: n. the feeling of rereading things you wrote as a teenager, a scattered collection of fossilized sentence fragments that might help complete the mythical skeleton of Homo melodramensis, which artists’ renderings depict as either a fast-moving hot-blooded pack hunter or a shuffling swamp creature roaring to itself about its oversized head and puny arms. (ISSO ISSO ISSO ISSO)
- aurora somnalis: n. the kaleidoscopic patterns you see just after closing your eyes to fall asleep, a series of hypnotic indigo and black clouds ghosting over red-cyan bird’s nests that dissolve and shiver into disco-floor spiderwebs fainter than campfire smoke against the night sky, which just makes you need to get up and check your email again.
sep 13 2011 ∞
sep 13 2011 +
sep 13 2011 +