Another Good And Sturdy Word: Hogwash

It was hogwash, if you really want to know the long and short of it. Pure and utter hogwash.

He knew damn well that he had better words than the words he’d been spitting at the world. He believed all sorts of decent things that, for some reason he couldn’t entirely understand, he wasn’t willing to publicly acknowledge. He was, in fact, a true believer, in all the biggest and most ridiculous things. At some moment in every day he would find himself paralyzed by pure, idiot wonder.

So much of what the world routinely served up to him –sights, sounds, smells, and all manner of sensation and random encounter– struck him as nothing less than magic and miracles. Yet at the bottom of the day, when he finally got around to sitting down with a pen in his fingers, all the gaunt terrors of memory and the moment would rise up in his head in their black robes, and he would find himself describing not a world of wonders, but the dreariest sort of pedestrian nonsense.

It was as if he had never known anything but desperation, confusion, anxiety, guilt, and futility. He had, of course, known all those things, but what really saved him and made him the person he helplessly was, a person so very grateful to be alive, were all those glimmering moments of wonderful strangeness and beauty and bursts of random hilarity and happiness.