don't call it a comeback

The news out of New York Fashion Week is a return to the square toe.


The news out of Milan Fashion Week is a return to the plague, this time known as coronavirus. Everything Thomas Mann is new again.


The halls of this dormant account have not been darkened by literary shadow in say, over three years entirely through fault of my own. Can I still write? Do I have something to say? Is there enough oxygen in the room? Can you start and stop and start again?


As Dorothy Parker famously quipped, "someone was using the pencil." Or more accurately, to paraphrase Judy Garland, perhaps "I never left."


At some point telling the tale of not telling becomes the point; missed opportunities, missed vantage points, torn pages from a journal never to be recovered. Blame the inauspicious return on harrowing times as we head into a possible dystopian future that somehow needs accounting. The fall must be accounted. 


So here I sit cavalierly sipping coffee and ruminating on the Oxford comma when I should instead be actively following up on multiple digital applications in the corporate world far removed from the safe confines of these word-filled halls. Similarly, resumes quite like blogging are simple auditions; attempts at acceptance, connection, persuasion. Any role in the chorus will do.


It appears the royal "We" are here at this place again. I cannot promise to be faithful, a fear of commitment also extends to preventing bumper stickers on my car. But unlike the hermetically capped correspondence between Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 'What There Is to Say We Have Said,' there is always another last word.

is this seat taken?

Not sure blogging is still a thing, whatever a 'thing' is. To skip four months of writing is to be remiss; to skip four years is simply to be missing. 

Much time has elapsed since my last entry and there aren't any guarantees we won't be revisiting this topic again in 2021.

However, do not post my milk carton obituary just yet. After all, a large segment of the population remains lactose-intolerant and won't see it anyway. 

Going forward, I shall endeavor to use this space in the manner to which it is accustomed, writing for the common good; joy, illumination, and insight. Every sentence on its page, every chair in its place.

obamacare, the city on seven million hills

Rome wasn't built in a day. It took 25 hours.


Actually, this sprawling, ancient Gotham, birthplace to Caesar and Da Vinci and Sinatra, was 750 years in the making and is a textbook example of a “work-in-progress.”


Speaking of ObamaCare.


Admittedly, there is no bigger fan than me of the much debated, litigated, legislated and re-litigated insurance industry reform bill passed by the current administration. If you weren't already sick to death of partisan bickering before hearing all the hoo-hah and hosannas about the sky falling from Republicans, you certainly are by now. Good thing pre-existing conditions won't exclude you from coverage.


So, yes my dears. As the early adopter that I am, I found myself marching to healthcare.gov on the first day of open enrollment only to find an error message telling me in unceremonious tones to come back later, no room at the inn.


Enduring a long history with Facebook and Twitter, I have built up an acceptance for the things I cannot control; refusal of service I believe it is commonly referred to.


I made a mental note to revisit the site at some other more opportune time and grab a drink in the interim to wait it out like any other sensible person.


Three weeks later, I'm still drinking.


Not that I've given up hope (or Change for that matter) but after four separate visits to the site I am still unable to even create an account let alone view specific plans or policies. Granted, I have been able to view preliminary rates and subsidies based on my household income and have to admit the pricing is extremely competitive, less than half what I currently pay.


With 7 million people still to register in the next six months, something akin to Noah loading the ark when it starts to sprinkle, I am cautiously optimistic that the internet gremlins and web snafus will dissipate with the autumn only to bear fruit in the spring.



If not, the next sound you hear may be violins playing while Rome burns.

boom.

If contractions were blog posts mine would be spaced eight months apart; not so much pregnant pauses as false labor.

I'm afraid it may take a shot of whiskey, clean towels, a midwife and forceps to pull out the next entry.

This is not due to a lack of material. Just the opposite.

What with Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and Friendster and MySpace -- scratch those last two -- I am overwhelmed by the opportunities to get my point across on multiple platforms. In the old days there was one soap box, now there are twelve.

Certainly you can see right through this ruse about writing about writing. I am merely marking time, dog-paddling, creating a digital placeholder to give the illusion that I am actually contributing something, anything, to my literary canon.

It is all smoke.

homestretch marks

I survived this election and all I got was defriended .

 Okay, so perhaps social media is not the best place to have spirited political discourse given the paltry 140 characters allotted to espouse views accrued over a lifetime. One might argue that Facebook and Twitter have become our generation's collective town square, the 60-watt bulb in that beacon on the hill, but many find it off-putting, intolerable, maddening when someone in their close-knit circle posts something out-of-step with their own reckoning.

 Keep typing the good type, I say.

 Isn't that precisely what distinguishes the United States from, say Saudi Arabia? Freedom of expression, even when it doesn't agree with your own circumscribed beliefs, is one of the most prized and valuable assets we possess. This is a country founded on both dissent and tolerance.

 It is the reason young men and women have bravely given their lives to fight far-flung wars to preserve our right to even criticize the very battles in which they are engaged. Remember Vietnam?

Now as we enter the final 30 days of this presidential election – which can't end soon enough, in my humble opinion – emotions have reached a fever pitch, as they always do. Trust me, the fever will break come November 7. Until then, bear with all the hand-wringing and commentary and second-guessing and prognostication and yes, defriending.

 Once this all over we can go back to complaining about that Facebook timeline thingy again.

literary laryngitis

Writers do not lose their voice, they merely misplace it.

Like an errant punctuation mark, or missing set of car keys, some things simply get laid in the wrong place. This happens to people all the time, but that is an entirely different subject matter and one not discussed in polite company.

As one who crafts advertising copy the way others bake bread or mop floors or grind sausage, I have lost the discipline to be long-winded, to string multiple thoughts together just so. After years of writing to fit prescribed spaces, my capacity to elongate has been truncated; chopped at the bit, as it were.

There is no literary Viagra to combat this malady.

One cannot conjure Faulkner or Hemingway while selling light bulbs. Why, even dear Sherwood Anderson would have a difficult time hawking eggs.

Not much good can ever come from a paragraph meant to elicit compulsion in a reader; that he must throw on slippers and a housecoat and run to the nearest corner store to purchase some totem of marketing that would be otherwise intolerable to live without.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once claimed that advertising “is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.”

There are no words.

who bares it best?

Another typical January in Texas; the lukewarm pablum of mid-70's and partly-cloudy skies ahead of the Manitoban winds which will invariably whip down from Canada reminding us why it is still, technically, winter. The sweater box is not far from hand. But today is a perfect day for tattersall and Didionesque complex sentences requiring no less than four or five commas, appositives, semicolons and other meaningful punctuation marks which make English teachers salivate.

We are in the season of unseasonableness. Weather and politics can turn on a dime, and if last night's South Carolina primary shows us anything, it's that the inevitable can quickly become the evitable in just one short 24-hour news cycle.

Like with Rick Santorum's much vaunted sweater vests, one day you're in and the next you're out. (Heidi Klum's marriage notwithstanding.)

Politics and fashion are strange bedfellows that rely on the fickleness of a shopping electorate who find themselves continually shopping for candidates. Take, for example, the liberal left. The conservative right. The Tea Party. The Libertarians, the Greens, the Occupiers. There also seems to be, if the news is to be trusted, a wide swath down the middle of Undecideds with whom I have never had any truck. They remind me of the people who can't make up their minds where to eat and end up choosing some establishment out of gustatory convenience, all the while complaining about the choice with a fork to their lips as if it were a gun to their heads.

Who constitutes these small percentages that aren't able to decisively lock down one candidate when Gallup calls, or who can go into voting booth not knowing who they will pull the lever for or darken the oval? Have the contrasts blurred so much that one choice seems as good as another?

Bare arms, my friends. The choices should be as clear as the weather. Or at least as easy as shopping for clothes hanging side-by-side on a rack. As with the Texas climate, change is something you can always believe in, and acrylic will never substitute for cashmere.

Never.