Greetings from Phraseos - 5-minute Freewrite #260 - Chalk

We are the people of the land of Phraseos. We live underground the city of Istanbul and you above-grounders don't even understand the power you have over us here. We live literally within the idioms, phrases, metaphors and analogies that AGHers (above-ground humans) use regularly. And so whatever poetic language lines fall out of use in your world, they also fall by the wayside here too.

However, many still remain. Take "fall by the wayside", for instance. How many AGHers know what a wayside even is? Well, we do. It's the side of a road, or a path. And so every time one of us accidentally use the phrase as a figure of speech, we must act it out.

We must go outside, fall next to a path or a road, before we can go back inside and resume our conversation. Many Phraseos households have wayside pillows for this purpose, which we tie around ourselves to break our falls.

When we inadvertently say something "broke our fall" we have to go into the cupboard and get the fallbreaker, which is a long thin piece of glass and a mallet. Someone must climb on the roof and drop the piece of glass and we must smash it with the mallet before it hits the ground, thus breaking its fall.

We have a lot of cupboard space in our dwellings.

There has not been an update in your phrase "chalk it up to experience" and so we can't yet use whiteboards much here, though they'd be much more convenient. No, we have to buy chalkboard paint and chalk so that whenever we have uncomfortable situations which cause us pain, we have to chalk them up to experience on the chalkboard in order to learn from them. It's quite cumbersome.

So if you could start saying "whiteboard marker it up to experience" that would be good.

But I guess the bright side of it is that our teachers can still throw dusters at their students. And ole Suki Kama, who lives round the corner from me, has been able to have a long career manufacturing chalkboard paint and chalk for Phraseos needs.

Suki produces regular-sized chalk for all of our experience-chalking requirements. She also makes very long pieces of chalk, which she rents out to people who need to demonstrate to others how very far they are from being finished in a certain situation. They rent out the chalk and show it to the person they are idioming to, and they say, "i'm not done yet. Not by a long chalk." Then they show the 12 foot long piece of chalk to that person and this grants them by law the right to be not finished at something for another 6 months.

Suki sells lots of chalk to soccer referees too, for the times when they disallow goals and must run out onto the ground and perform an elaborate ritual of chalking off the goal so that it doesn't count.

She has recently begun a profitable sideline with a local cheesemaker, Bill Stottinbottom. When people say that two people are as alike as chalk and cheese, Suki and Bill provide them with said items in which to perform the chalk and cheese ritual, in which the two people described throw a coin which decides who is chalk and who is cheese, and each must eat a large piece of their new talisman.

It is a very unusual life for us living in Phraseos, I suppose you would think. We are not an efficient society as everything is time-consuming and any slip of the tongue into a metaphor or phrase or idiom can mean a two-or-three-hour ritual must ensue. We love living in Phraseos however. We do not live under a capitalist system here. We are a most poetic people, and so we love our ritual-rich life. We even feel a bit sorry for you humans and the more metaphorically barren life the digital linear world has brought upon you.

And so this is our official invitation to you, the beautiful but metaphorically challenged humans of the topside world. We wish to extend a cordial invitation to our upcoming festival on 32nd July. It is one of our favourite festivals, the Art Washes Away From The Soul The Dust Of Everyday Life Festival. Please BYO swimwear.

This is today's contribution to the @freewritehouse #freewite, the prompt of which is "chalk". I ended up taking waaaaaay longer than five for this fantastical ramble :)

Two young Phraseosians competing hard at the 2017 Leave No Stone Unturned Festival.
CC0