THE GIZMOPHOBE...

You may have noticed that my blog (R4) is atypically uncluttered with pictures, icons, URLs, Google ads, Twitter come-ons, YouTube links, dancing rainbow Tasmanian Devils or any of the billion other little cyber-thingies that populate the blog world. Perhaps you suppose that this is due to a disturbing fondness on my part for expanses of abstractly-splotched pink watercolor background, but that’s not it.

No, the reason that stuff isn’t there is because... well, because I am a true gizmophobe.

gizmo·phobia (\'giz-mō-'fō-bē-ə) n.  Fear of or aversion to technology, especially computers and high technology. (See also: Luddite, Neanderthal.)

See, I have a serious fear of all things techie, geeky, nerdy, HTML-y, and so forth. (I suspect this came about because when I was still young and innocent my über-geek brother tried to ram DOS into my brain, leaving me cruelly traumatized and determined to forever avoid anything with a plug.) I don’t like cell phones (just looking at a Droid stresses me out), MP3 players strike me as alien and sinister, and I always offer prayerful thanks when the printer actually prints instead of exploding. (As for changing the ink cartridge... can I have a Xanax?)

In light of this, it should come as no surprise when I confess that as I was setting up my fabulous blog, the actual process of assembling the components filled me with dread. I was confronted with an array of mysterious items: “templates”, “layout width”, “hover color”, and the like. Then, after an hour of tentative key taps to see what might (or might not) happen, I came across an elongated outline that proclaimed, in words striking terror to my very core: “INSERT GADGET HERE”.  

Horrors!

Now, admittedly I’m a bit of a prude, but the thought of inserting gadgets anywhere is waay outside my comfort zone. What kind of gadget?? I didn’t want any stupid gadgets. I just wanted to write posts and have fun and try to be amusing and not be harassed and LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY WITH THE GODDAM GADGETS!!

Then, when I finally thought I’d gotten everything sorted out, I clicked on something called “Preview” to check it all out, and up popped one of those hideous messages that make 21st century life such a non-stop joy:

“Internet Explorer cannot display the page because scrammis bollafip can’t virp splignit when you ick the screeble. Press ‘retry’ to retry, or ‘cancel’ to waste the entire past three hours because you are a lame loser from the previous century who would be more at home attending a husking bee than trying to use a computer. Error message: ICUR12BAtwit.”

Sigh...

I think I’ll go have some prune juice and practice using the can opener.

Until next we meet,

Be at peace.
Lannie Woulff

OF LOQUACITY...

“Moderation ought never be taken to extremes." – Anonymous

Well, okay. Anonymous didn’t say that. I did, during a recent doomed effort to transform myself into an aphorist along the lines of Messrs. La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, and Wilde. I have always relished the keen or catty bon mot, and so I set out to become a master of the Pithy Truism.

All very well, but I ran into a headwind straight away. These sorts of wise quips and witticisms all have one thing in common: they are succinct. As anyone who knows me will readily confirm, succinctness is not my forte. I have something of a tendency toward volubility; as my spouse is wont to observe, I can “download” until people want to cover their ears and scream. (Just to give you some idea, I could hold forth at great length on the subject of brevity.) True story: When my daughter was about three years old, she made the mistake of asking me an innocent question, whereupon I launched into an encyclopedic discourse about lord knows what. She scrunched up her beautiful little face, rolled her eyes and pleaded, “DAD! Don’t say more words.” I was so stunned and proud that I actually shut up, and that remains one of our most precious father-daughter memories to this day. Which, naturally, I recite in great detail at every opportunity, to her endless chagrin.

Of course, this prolixity shows up in my writing, too. The first draft of SHE’S MY DAD emerged from my fevered mind at over 173 thousand words, from which I then cut almost 24 thousand. A lot of unnecessary long-windedness, to say the least. Determined to write more efficiently as I work on my new book, I sternly order myself to be concise and to the point, with no ruffles and flourishes. The result isn’t fewer ruffles and flourishes, but fewer words at all, since I’ve hamstrung myself from letting the prose flow naturally in a blathering torrent, which is the way I write. (Can you tell? Believe it or not, I heavily edited this entry.) That's what comes of trying to be brief, when one’s natural inclination is to be effusive.

The one area where I did have a bit of luck at keeping things short was in the realm of poetry, even though poetry is the art of saying much in few words, whereas my art involves saying much, period. Nonetheless, I did manage to compose a few reasonably compressed poems, which folks seemed to find engaging rather than embarrassing. (Whew!) Here’s an example of my attempt at poetic concision:

Calming Waters

When the common uncommonly riles
and constant strain of constant pain
pops rivets from sanity's support beams,
I yearn for refuge and renewal
someplace on a solitary seacoast.

Where salty waves mesmerize
with metronomic eternity,
isolated with my transience
I seek to rediscover the serenity
of relative insignificance.

Pretty succinct, right?

But, as is said of the dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park, “Nature always finds a way.” Before long, this is what I produced:

The Porcine Pedant

It occasionally crosses my mind

-- as a termite will a hotplate--
while I wallow porcine, pompous,

pickling in the brine of my megamorphic rectitude,
that my wonderful existence as Emperor of the Over-Learned Bores,
attained after a lifelong struggle to absorb more useless mental chaff than
any mortal in history
to be spewed as water from a busted hydrant in blathering cascades without end,
may be placed in jeopardy by my own gluttonous disregard

for the mundane verity
that a subsistence upon swollen ego and

oleaginous orotundity and

animal grease
must inevitably result in ghastly bloat of form and deadly stress of ticker...

But then!

Secure in my conviction that the Almighty

daren't apply to my sociopathic rotundity
the laws of physics by which She governs the rest of the Universe,
I reach for yet another fistful of tallow

to pound into my over-clogged capillaries,
bravely marching in Strasbourg goose-step to martial strains

played by McDonald's Cholesterol Band
into a glorious future of back-pain and

wheezing for breath and

double airplane seats
to accommodate a posterior grown broader than a Simmental cow's,
over the cliff of myocardial infarction to that intellectually barren

Land of Rubber Tubes
which lies just short of the

Kingdom of Mental Parsnips
where nary an ignoramus can sight-translate

Trilobite me

from the original Aramaic
and enemas lurk behind green curtains

waiting to pounce with radiator flush
and Vaselined nozzles.

Alas for brevity!

Hmm... perhaps I should try my hand at writing a short story.

Until next we meet,
Be at peace.
Lannie Woulff

INITIATE FIRING SEQUENCE...

Right, then: With considerable reluctance, I have concluded that it is time for me to join the 21st century, succumb to the inevitable, and start my own blog. To do this, as a famous disgrace once declared, “is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.”
 

Well, too bad, Lannie. Get over yourself, get with the program, and start shooting your mouth off. It’s what you do most of the time anyway; that whole reticence thing is an affectation, and nobody likes a poser.

Why now? Well, for one thing, they say it’s absolutely crucial for a writer to have a blog these days. Ah, you ask, but exactly who are THEY? Why, the very same all-knowing THEY who decree that you can’t give lamb chop bones to the cat (it might choke), or wear long hair if you’re over forty (tacky and pathetic), or read Huckleberry Finn (Twain is, like, such a racist), or believe that Beltway pundits have less collective sense than a rutabaga. THEY are the ultimate faceless authorities before whom we all cringe, and genuflect, and scuttle under the refrigerator, lest THEY think we have a mind of our own.

By starting a blog, I can now become one of the mob, a sure-nuff member of the blaberatti, spewing forth declamations and opinions on anything and everything that strikes my fancy; an exercise in metastasized self-indulgence that really, when you think about it, is nicely reflective of the prevailing societal attitude these days.

Incidentally, I truly loathe the word “blog”, which is unquestionably one of the ugliest words ever coined. It sounds like some sort of demonic troll in “Lord of the Rings” (yes, dears, I know that was the Balrog) but you get my point. Personally I would’ve preferred bdiary, bjournal, or even bchronicle, but no one consulted me, so we’re stuck with "blog”. Alas for the English language!

Now, although like most writers I am tinged with megalomania and exist in a more-or-less permanent state of self-absorption, I’m fully aware that my blog will prove to be of no consequence whatsoever in the grand scheme of things. Actually, I’m sort of counting on it, because there’s great comfort to be had in embracing one’s utter unimportance. Besides, in a world already overflowing with such atrocities as reality television shows, aerosol cheese spread and Wall Street, this blog (hereinafter referred to as “R4”) will at best be a minor additional horror.

I don’t often make promises, but here’s an exception, paraphrased from the mandatory Honor Code signature required on all academic submissions at my esteemed alma mater, Princeton: “I pledge my honor as a gentlewoman that, in writing this blog, I shall take neither myself, nor anything else, seriously.”

Since finally starting a blog,

Miss Lannie’s an Internet cog.
With consummate poise,
she adds her own noise,
which thickens the cyber-space fog.

 See what I mean?

To quote Mr. Longfellow: “Excelsior!”

Until next we meet,

Be at peace.
Lannie Woulff