Since his book was self published a couple of months ago this wasn't in it, had he waited to finish it then maybe it would have been. But since he didn't wait, it falls on me to share for free rather than for you to go out and buy. Then again, you should probably buy his book anyway.

Your tar balls are in my junk shot

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Here's something I bet you never thought you'd hear coming out of your own luscious mouth in this or any other of your million slippery existential lifetimes, more or less:

"Oh my sweet capitalist god, I wish the top kill had worked after the useless top hat and that botched junk shot, because now the tar balls are rolling in, and the tar patties are collecting into glumpy gloops all over the beaches, and you can see the sheen stretching for 100 miles in all directions, all because the damn blowout preventer jammed and, of course, now they've dumped a million gallons of toxic dispersant on the gushing plume since the relief wells aren't nearly complete. We need more skimmers!"

Quite a mouthload, is it not? All sorts of joyful burden to roll these new and oily words around on your tongue, like candy-coated gunpowder? Like little cubes of raw demon blood? Verily.

It's yet another example of a fascinating little phenomenon: For every disaster and global heartbreak, for every world-altering mindf-- of a toxic event, so evolves new verbiage, new frameworks, new structures of meaning, mouthmoves and tongue lashings, lip gyrations and glottal stops to contain it all.

In other words, other words. Every war, every devastation, every invention and advancement lets us further mutate, mingle and shapeshift our mindmelds, bedazzle the dictionary and upflip the lexicaldingle as we reconfigulate the snugglemodes of the metaverbalizer. You follow me? Of course you do.

So it goes. Alongside the flagrant and heartbreaking evil that is the BP spill, a whole swarm of not just strange and wonderful, depressing and cool new words, but also new implications and insinuations, layers and ideas promptly installing themselves into the American heartsong -- at least for awhile, at least until the next big thing comes along to knock those words to the back nine of our collective unconscious, recycled back into the fertile madhouse topsoil that we call modern communication.

So then, what phrases and ticks from this particular epic meltdown do you think will stick to the roof of the cultural maw? What BP-themed verbiage will permanently penetrate the vocabulary, the American identity forevermore? Top kill? Tar balls? Deepwater Horizon? How has this event reshaped the American lexicon, and, by extension, our wonky understanding of just who the hell we think we are?

Maybe it's "BP" itself. Really, is it not quaint to recall how, not a mere few weeks ago, those two benign initials used to represent so many harmless and sweet ideas?

Aside from British Petrol, there was "beer pong" and "buddy profile," "blood pressure" and "bill pay" and even "bowl pack," as in a nice fat, bowl of marijuana to be smoked so as to enable the imbiber to recline and chillax so as to not to buzzkill the vibe and concern oneself with the utter and ongoing devastation of the planet. Ah, simpler times.

No longer. Oh BP, have you seen what hath become of your two tiny, nefarious initials? Here, let some of my brilliant Facebook fans/readers offer you some humble suggestions for a new interpretation. Maybe something like:

Bastard Polluters. Brutally Pollutive. Beyond Pollution. Bitch, Pay! Big Pricks. Bringing Poison. Bilderberg Perps. Brown Pelicans. Black Poison. Black Plague. Beyond Pathetic. Blundering Pissants. Bio-Philistines. Buncha Pinheads. Bloated Parasites. Blatant Profiteering. Bush Policy. Bush/Palin. Bitumen Prostitutes. Bitter Pill. Barbarian Pigs. Bariatric Pillagers. Blatant Plunderers. Biohazard Plumes. Better Payup. Beyond Prosecution. Bitch, Please. And (my personal favorite) Beauty's Pedophiles.

Of course, as any good cunning linguist will tell you, all such shapeshifting phraseologies are merely markers, symbols, stand-ins for things meaty and chthonic in our psyches, verbal representations for how many pins can dance on the head of an angel.

All language is just a slippery system of symbols and glyphs meant to point somewhat specifically toward some oily idea of what we think it might mean to meander down this wayward path of whothehellknowsuntilyoudie.

Let's be clearer, but still more ambiguous: As shifts the language, so shifts perceptions, minds, hearts, reality. Is that obvious? Maybe. Have you considered it in relation to our most vile admonitions? As we all observe the black wall of petrodeath as it poisons the very waters that sustain the vast majority of life on the planet, something happens, deep down, to our collective understanding, something oily and dark and not at all related to the happy ending to the story we're all trying to tell each other.

Like the top kill, like the junk shot, like the blowout preventer, the words we create ultimately fail, fall short of stopping the gushing plume of tragic meanings, the feeling that something is enormously wrong with how we're going about eating and screwing, singing and dying on this pale blue dot.

Put it this way: Our words, our media, our storytelling try to capture it all -- the spreading sense of dread, the glooming doom, the hope for a quick and healthy fix despite the sinking feeling that one ain't coming anytime soon -- to keep it in check and keep it from poisoning the pristine waters of life and love surrounding it. The oil is poisoning the ocean. The meanings are poisoning the soul.

So we try to speak about it. We try to joke about it. We try to add catchphrases and puns, action verbs and punch lines. Then you see the photos, grasp the scale of the horror, feel the blackness invade your heart, and it hits you: There simply are no words.