Mat For

For Mat, who yesterday, against my better judgement, exhorted me not to give up the wordpress.  

Continuing my series on advices for the modern writer, I shall seek to debunk the traditional belief (promoted by certain unlettered bloggers, historians, and book binders) that writer’s block can be cured by peripatetic means. There is only one cure for writer’s block  and that’s an alfalfa sandwich on whole wheat toast–made by pygmies or a coven of witches; regarding pygmies, any race of diminutives or lilliputians will do: check the farmers’ almanac or get in touch with your nearest anthropological society–don’t call as they never seem to be home.

The real problem with words, from a semantic perspective, is that they must be de rigueur combined in such a way. I think Wittgenstein agrees with me on this important finding. But there’s such a thing as being too careful. One can easily depauperate the language by trying to make it conform to comely though arbitrary rules. I once came upon a garden of great beauty and instinctively took a machete to it in the mistaken belief that I could tame its wild beauty. Naturally I was charged with trespass by some uppity landowner, and the calamitous fortnight spent in the jailhouse, next to a toothless hobo (malodorous and no doubt implicated in some heinous sex crime) and without basic amenities such as an electric razor, proper ventilation, and unfettered access to fresh fruit, carambola and black sapote for example, was truly distasteful.

My lawyer, a former ventriloquist, was already making great strides in extricating me from my unfortunate predicament. An early release was imminent, or so his dummy was telling me. Our basic legal strategy was to confound the sheriff’s deputy with a litany of detailed requests for information. Swimming in a toilet bowl of paperwork, his mind (the little morsel atop his head) would be too busy to notice the telltale signs of a brazen escape attempt involving a front-end loader, an enormous bulldozer, and a giant catapult (rented, I think, from a mafia don). Bruno, that was the dummy’s Christian name, assured me that the plan was solid and that a failed attempt would not unduly prejudice my case.

The toothless man started to dig a tunnel (he had indubitably seen this in a movie). Later, at three miles from the jail, he collapsed, rusted spoon in hand, seventy-five feet under a dairy truck. Meanwhile the stealth operation at the jailhouse was on schedule. Depute Dunderhead was in a stertorous slumber (incredible what bureaucracy can do to the small, underworked mind) when a flamboyant man, Mr. X,  whose first name after our brief introduction sounded like Dae Us, and looking strangely like Peter Lorre, arrived with letters of transit and I was given safe passage to a neighboring island.

Thus ends this week’s lesson on writer’s block. And here are the three blocks you must play with: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And as Mat often says (while shooting a pistol from the oeil-de-boeuf window of his lavatory): the writing is eeezy–it’s the reeder that buggers things up.

Mat’s writing can be found

• in literary journals;
• https://drysailorboy.wordpress.com/
• and shredded, to amuse the chickens.

This just in …

Arbosculpture

And

Timebox

 

 

 

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