I’m having trouble focusing on much else. I am somewhat preoccupied with my son Matt’s well- being. He is on a waiting list for imminent (?) surgery on his broken ankle — needs two pins, one on either side to screw it together, but of course he must give way to life-and-death situations.

We went to see Matt this morning, my other son and I. I will go back this afternoon, ordered to take a cab because my other son doesn’t want two broken legs in the family this week. The path to the subway station has two residents who do not clear their sidewalk. I’ll put a hex on them, as effective as complaining.

I’ll get back to my screenplay any hour now. I wish. Think about subtext, always fascinating. I found a list of tools to help me load my characters with subtext. My characters are polite, bland Canadians, mealy-mouthed and unexceptional on the surface but each one has her own agenda. That’s what I must work on, with. Here’s my list: Metaphor; Implication; Insinuation; Hint; Sarcasm: Allusion.

"A metaphor you may remember, is “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable: when we speak of gene maps and gene mapping, we use a cartographic metaphor | [ mass noun ] : her poetry depends on suggestion and metaphor • a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else: the amounts of money being lost by the company were enough to make it a metaphor for an industry that was teetering. ORIGIN late 15th cent.: from French métaphore, via Latin from Greek metaphora, from metapherein ‘to transfer’.”

We all speak in metaphors constantly, so it’s easy to use metaphor as an easy means of subtext. How dull our speech would be if we spoke only in straight lines, as it were. Half the jokes we make or hear are either metaphors or puns (puns of metaphors).

To paraphrase Robert Browning: Man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a metaphpr?

more to come, like tomorrow?