O

Oh there have to be so many ways to go with this, right? —having arrived at the fourth vowel and 15th letter of the alphabet. Coordination of the following. Considerations for the poetic "O," to which I admit I am partial, as in "O joy" (although, on conventional grounds, I really don't mind typing the H, except, you know, oh what the blasted hell is it doing there anyway). Maybe the poetic O now bears a burden of irony, but also, straight up, it's poetic. O lovely locution. O bring it on. Considerations for the orgasm, naturally. The orgasm face, to wit—the "oh face" (or is that "O face," because it's more poetical?). Considerations for Om, which rises from the belly and extends vibrations-wise into the universe. Speaking of the universe, O is among the most universal of the vowels, right? Certainly in the long version. The short version is a little more problematical, swapping around, with A, various mysterious intonations I confess I don't always hear (sometimes, both A and O, combined with U, or W, or A with itself), as in "stop," "halt," "caught," "awful," "foul," and/or "aardvark." But let that go. It's English, Jake. In O we do find one of the most beautiful letters in the perfect shape of the circle. The mystic circle. The only thing more perfect is the sphere, which O kind of approximates too. In contrast, since I brought it up, there is the masculinist upright bar of the I, and all attendant problems with ego fixation (as noted elsewhere). But among the letters there is otherwise truly no triangle, no square, no rectangle. Ironically, in some fonts the O becomes a square. That's a chortle, but more often it is the D taking the shape if any letter does. But what do I know about typefaces? I scribble in notebooks. Still, the letter O, the letter I probably, and what else? U? Here we are now at the primal levels. Does that perhaps account for why O is tucked in so relatively deep into the alphabet, all the way to the back in the second half? What is that about? Furthermore, stepping back for a little light perspective, take that third tray of letters from the alphabet the way I learned it—L, M, N, O, and P. I think there might have been a rock band called LMNOP and it's really fun to say too, or sing, as in the "ABC Song." You could almost spell out the word "lemon" if you could get that O up in front of the N. And throw in the E. Well, you know what I mean. Making lemons out of lemonade, right? Well, that's just O for you. Everywhere you want to be.