Progressive Mad-libs!!!

Tapfret wrote: The young gerbil's psychosis is clearly born of his soul patch hands. Such a disturbing palpation would set most girls fleeing his lap. It is not surprising that Gilberte's playfulness generated such an explosive response.

Very good point indeed! This is also invoking the "play within the play", though inverted: Here the proustagonist is the usurper, while Gilbert’s father acts as both the rightful king and his own ghost.

Perhaps needless to say, gerbil is derived from the name Gilberte. The interesting part is that Gilberte contains all of the gerbil, and still some more — to be exact, the two letters t and e. Of course both Proust and Waters knew that te means tea (French thé) in the Scandinavian languages, and Gilbert’s tea parties are crucial for the relationship between the main characters.

On the other hand, if we swap the two letters, we get ET. In English it means extra-terrestial, in French extra-terreste. For the young gerbil (notice that the French word for gerbil [gerbille] also includes the French masculine definite article le), the young woman not only contains the whole of himself, but also is a creature of another world.

The young gerbil's psychosis is clearly born of his soul patch hands. Such a disturbing palpation would set most girls fleeing his lap. It is not surprising that Gilberte's playfulness generated such an explosive response.

It’s the hallmark of a great poet that P. A. Waters avoids the obvious word "child" and chooses the far more interesting metaphor "gerbil" instead. The desert rat is about as far from the Dickensian Christmas and the Coca Cola-Santa as you can come, and yet it describes the process of growing up with an astonishing acuteness. There’s also a subtle reference to Proust here: In Autour de Madame Swann, the hero, while play fighting with the girl Gilberte (whom he is in love with), ejaculates in his pants. This helps us to understand the somewhat obscure line when I was a gerbil I caught a fleeting reindeer out of the corner of my lap. After that it’s easy to understand why he feels comfortably run.

Whoa that was quick! I will post now..

So, to give it the correct Christmas ending:

34. solstice bell(s)
35. hangover

EDIT: I wrote, "solstice", then changed it to "solstice bell(s)". It’s probably better, and I think a tribute to JT is appropriate here.


Edited by refugee - December 18 2010 at 15:31

22. Clutching

23. refugee

24. Run

16. Uvula

17. Marching

18. Singing

10. Chimney

11. Kiss

12. Mistletoe

4. slide/sliding

5. aroused

6. Santa Cap