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.