A few weeks ago I was on a webinar with a marketing expert, presumably from somewhere in Eastern Europe who was talking about “sneee-pitz.” The urge to say this word out loud with the accent is like an itch I am desperate to scratch. I know this must be inappropriate. Fortunately, I spend a lot of time at home with my cat who understands I am not making fun of anyone and would never tell on me even if I was. Some words are just fun to say.

And that’s funny, isn’t it? These words that stick to us … the bits of language that bounce around in our brains. Fragments. Verbal earworms. It’s never the whole song that gets stuck in your head. It’s that one bit, that specific snippet on repeat. Just a line. Hardly a quote. A sound bite.

As a writer, I’ve never known what to do with these words. The scraps.

File under great titles? Lines to write scripts around. Could this become a poem?

An excuse to procrastinate from the real work of writing by making a collage?

I made this image for my daughter whose fashionable design sense stops short of what to hang on the walls. It was too colorful for her. She wants black and white. Minimalist neutrals. Gold frames. Damn you Kardashians.

It may not count as writing but I thought it was cute enough to share. I enjoy using the visual part of my brain and the perspective play and narrative elements of collage design. I may make more of these. I’ve got plenty of snippets with nowhere to go.

-ag, july 2022