Tag Archives: cloying

Cloying

Cloying: (adj) an excess of sweetness, richness, or sentiment.

When we need something and we can’t find what’s real, generally speaking, we have to settle for the best fake available.

I remember the first time I ate imitation crab meat. I had eaten real crab meat before. The imitation did not taste the same. But when I considered the price difference, I allowed that phony crab to attract me–in its cloying way.

It is my great exasperation that we are getting so accustomed to cloying, tugging, pulling, phony emotion out of awkward situations, that we will begin to believe that the original, natural form of feeling is implausible.

After all, since human beings are heart creatures, they need to feel.

Even though there are philosophies, political parties and religions which try to remove sentiment from the equation, we still end up with stiff cardboard cutouts, who every once in a while have to fake paper-thin emotions.

When does it become cloying?

It’s cloying when I realize I need to feel something but don’t, so I insert it anyway–instead of feeling something and needing to express it as soon as possible.

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Aeschylus

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aeschylus: (c. 390 – 314 BC) Greek dramatist, best known for his tragedies Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides. Considered to be the father of the Greek tragedy.

Not only the father of the Greek tragedy, but also seemingly the parent of prime-time television and the movie industry of our present day.

After all, if we don’t insert some tragedy into the stories we tell, we risk some critic dubbing our tale “saccharine, cloying,” or worse yet–“family fare.”

There is a common aversion in today’s social strata against sharing a story with ups, downs, ins and outs, which ends up with a realistic conclusion instead of a Hollywood ending. Matter of fact, I think it would be impossible for the 24-hour news cycle to report anything that isn’t either sensational or able to be sensationalized.

And let me offer a tidbit of opinion which will probably grind the teeth of some of my readers: when there is a shooting at a school or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and we begin to hear the phrase, “death toll” introduced into the storyline, even though our better selves hope that people will not be killed, we sometimes might be a little disappointed when this running death toll does NOT rise.

We have geared the American public to be thirsty for blood–as long as it’s not their own. If their little angel sons and daughters have a small prick on the finger, they ready to rush them to the emergency room. But we will watch with a mixture of horror and intrigue as the offspring in Haiti wallow in mud, disease and death.

We are a tragic clump of clods, who honor Aeschylus by perusing the Internet for even MORE of the bizarre.

And if anyone such as myself would dare to object to the onslaught of the macabre, we have prepared speeches decrying these idealistic fools as “sappy”–or worse yet, “religious.”

To reach a point where we can stand tall and pursue our dreams, we will need to reject the fallacy of failure as being inevitable in the human experience. Not everything has to come up roses.

But why in the hell would we plant just thorns?