An Apology to the Reader(s)

The more I work in this format the more I, like a muscle car in a snowstorm, seem to be sliding out of control. Before I entered into the blogosphear I used to laugh at the stories of sentences run amuck, the clauses piling upon one another like a baby-oil wrestling match until all that is left is a slick writhing mass with no clear beginning or end. That laughter has turned to bitter tears, for now I can only stand helplessly by as metaphors, similes, and analogies gallop like so many Cossacks through the Polish village of my mind, leaving only scorched earth and the lamentations of those few who survive. Oh, once I could express myself by simply laying word upon word until the fullness of my intent was conveyed. Now even the simplest of concepts becomes twisted with subtext, context, pretext, and posttext.

How did this come to pass? How did I, once the most lucid of communicators, come to this sad state? The real reasons are lost in the mists of time and space, let the hard eye of history parse fact from convenient fiction; I’ll abide here and offer only this simple story, told in straight forward country-speak and narrated by John Wayne, so that those who pass a moment here may learn from my missteps and dance lightly by the pitfalls that have swallowed me entire.

I remember the first time I used figurative language for emphasize; it was the summer of ’85 and I compared a burned grilled cheese sandwich to an asphalt roofing tile. I thought it was harmless fun, just another kid out to get a cheap buzz. I stood there elated, jubilant, triumphant, exultant, redundant; it was as if for the first time in my life I was truly alive. I was Icarus lifting slowly from the Minotare’s prison, gloriously aloft on my father’s handmade waxwings; but the sun is always closer than one thinks. It changed me; from that day on everything was as a summers day, a pig in poke, or, at my lowest ebb, the bridge to the twenty-first century. Oh I was having fun, let no one tell you otherwise, but the cost. Pretty soon I couldn’t even express something as simple as the betrayal of the communist revolution by its leadership with out using a thirty thousand word allegory about farm animals. Oh, I was shedding wax and feathers but I didn't care; and the things I said and wrote, they became beautiful but empty, like a lingerie story mannequin.

I can’t expect forgiveness but all the same but all the same I offer my apologies dear reader.