Practicing Inversions

This afternoon, I sold some clothes. While waiting my turn in the sellers' line, I overheard the two saleswomen talking about Sylvia Plath, whom I've never actually read. I should pick up the "Bell Jar", I thought. Isn't it tragic that as an English major, Plath's death-by-oven and obsession with pie-making are all I know of her, and even then, as information secondhand?

Too many things on my to-read list. Admittedly, Moby Dick has been sitting on my shelf since the eighth grade. "It was my favorite book," my uncle told me. I've never thought of selling it or even giving it away, because I will read it, maybe soon. Someone's favorite book is not to be taken lightly. At the time, it may just have seemed too hefty a read.

Lately, life has seemed like tackling a whale. Something monstrous and elusive and untamed, it seems. Getting through writing, slogging through the mire of rough drafts and stories whose voices or plots seem a bit off, has been a bit of a rough sea. I'm a peg-legged Ahab cursing the great beast. Consumed by vendetta, I can't see straight, don't know west from east, north from south. The story, the words, the text, the time, they're circling, a vortex. They're circling, like vultures I'd say - but that'd be going from ocean to desert in one paragraph.

How Jonah got out, I can't recall.

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium's
Liable to walk upon the scene

To illustrate my last remark
Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark
What did they do just when everything looked so dark?

(Man, they said "We'd better accentuate the positive")
("Eliminate the negative")
("And latch on to the affirmative")
Don't mess with Mister In-Between (No!)
Don't mess with Mister In-Between...

For some reason, I could've sworn the word "pejorative" was in there, but then I looked it up and that means just the opposite of the gist of the song. Was it "let go of the pejorative", perhaps?

Note: Johnny Mercer's lyrics were not inversions, but my sentences, for the most part, were.