🎧 Verbal Portrait No. 2 (Audio)
Above: Again, a far cry from my recording setup
Your wish is my command, dear reader.
Due to overwhelming popular demand, I give you more auditory White Noise!
If you have been with White Noise from the beginning, you will know that I enjoy dabbling in experimental formats, media, and schema. A perennial favorite of mine and of yours (per Substack analytics) is the Verbal Portrait:
From vivid descriptions of my most minute observations, I attempted to create a coherent verbal “image.” Like the pointillistic brushstrokes of Seurat, my words would obfuscate if read individually, but render clarity when taken as a whole. Hence, the idea of verbal portraiture was born.
A Verbal Portrait is a specific, hyper-detailed description of the reality an individual sees in front of him/her.
I invite you to close your eyes, and visualize the portrait the spoken words paint for you. ⬇️
Verbal Portrait of a Writer in a Bar
The midday light wove through the whirling, dust-filled air and glanced against the waxed wood. The man ran his hands over the uneven counter: a scarred battlefield, its foxholes carved by an artillery of restless glasses and its surface washed by stank overpours. He fingered every last pockmark and massaged the wood as though it were his partner. Though he had no partner but the bottle.
His eyes fell upon a denim-coated, scruffy type suckling from his beer bottle as he would a teat. Though blue-collar, that color indicated neither his political leanings nor his attitude towards everyday life.
At least probably not right now.
Such was the mental lacquer of alcohol. It pulled down shades to counteract reality’s bright lights, darkening the willful imperfections held in each one’s own heart.
With that he silently lauded himself,
“What a description! What a marvelous description! Indeed you are a writer, fella!”
He then downed the sticky, frothy, non-refreshing drink they called beer in front of him. Indeed, he hoped that the sloshing liquid would ignite a chaotic maelstrom within him. A frenetic creativity that would help him unlock that universally-accessible language he could set down on paper. A language that would evoke tears, laughs, smiles, and hate.
But first, a second drink.
If you enjoyed this verbal portrait, listen to some others:
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