It is never too late to learn a fundamental truth about yourself. Of course, most of us spend a lifetime trying to avoid doing just that, but that's another story. The signs had been there all along. From elementary school through college, it was clear that I was terrible with metaphors, simile, and poetry.
Any fool knows that.
The music of the '60s posed special difficulties for us literal-minded folk, Bob Dylan above all. Literal-mindedness probably explains why, in the great cultural divide of that decade, some of us came down on the side of the Rolling Stones rather than the Beatles. This belated bit of self-awareness leads me to move beyond my own particular affliction to divide humankind into literals and figuratives . The former hear words as they sound, no matter how absurd. The latter allow for a certain artistic looseness with language.