This post has no pictures because it is better than that

I feel a little trapped by this blog, in that I have created internal pressure on myself to always try and be funny.

This has left no room for serious writing.

Even when I have attempted more introspection, I felt compelled to add illustrations, and those illustrations turned my thoughts into parody.

Really though, more often than not, I am a serious, unhappy person.

I wish I wasn't, but I just am.

My life is filled with all the amenities of a typical white thirtysomething man: a house, a wife, children, a faux beard.

Stop it, brain.

Don't say faux beard, that is not a serious thing at all.

I wonder what my wife would think, if she knew I just wrote that she is an amenity?

Pssst....here's a secret: I don't even know what amenity means.


I bet she doesn't either, so I could say "I didn't mean anything by it, because I didn't even know what I meant," and she could answer, "I forgive you, I didn't know what you meant either. It just sounded like it could be bad."

"'Sounded like'", I would laugh, and reach for her hand."We all sound like things that we don't really mean, babe."

She would smile at me, but inside she would be thinking, he never calls me babe, I wonder what's wrong.


And I would be thinking, Man my hand is so chubby, it looks like it is eating my wife's hand. I start chuckling to myself.

She ponders, why is he laughing, is he laughing at me? What a jerk.

She pulls away from me.

Geez, we've been married for like five years or something, you'd think a little fart would be no big deal. I pull away from her too, because now my feelings are hurt.


My feelings get hurt pretty easily, anyways.

My wife used to make me do this one exercise game we had, just so she could laugh at me.

It hurt my feelings.


Have I blogged about that before?
I have de blog vu.


See, that's the problem. If the most I have to write about is my wife laughing at me while I twirl, then I have no business writing anyways.

I am bringing nothing to the table of life.

No thematic depth, no topical analysis.


I mean, Gweenbrick, come on....the world is in a terrible state, the euro is in flux, the....nations...they are....in quandary.....food is being made...I mean come on, its being made in...factories. The chickens, the chickens, they have freakishly big breasts. So big. They can't even peck...peck there at the corn or whatever.

And don't even get me started on recycling...it's all so terrible....does chewing gum go in the "Bio" bin?

When I am doing paper, am I supposed to separate the whites from the coloreds?

Oh my gosh, that brings up race in this country.

There is so much race in this country, race as far as the eye can see, and yet children still go hungry.

Yes, with all we have, there is still a need for signposts of despair such as Toys for Tots.

We have so far to go.

What can I contribute to the global conversation?

What beauty can I offer that the ugliness of the world so to pierce with said beauty, thine ugliness it stands before me? pa-rumpum pum pum?

With that irreproachable of intention, I now present to you a poem I will compose as I type it right now.

You are witnessing blog jazz, free-form improvisational expression of all that is sickly inside me, all that is glorious, all that is big words joined by onomatopoeia.

I draw breath.
I draw breath and the world exhales with me.
It nods as I shrug.
And collapses beneath it's painful skirt,
cinched tightly about the root
and glazed with pheromone.
I drew breath.
The world cannot draw,
it has no hands, no fingers,
save the one finger that matters,
the finger that beckons,
like an old crone, feeding the birds.
Run Michael, Run Jane,
it is not just a tuppence.
It is your soul.

You might think I am foolish, pathetically sentimental, but I wept a little while I wrote that poem.

I wept, and I laughed, and then wept again.

And then I just stared at the screen, shaking my head in quiet awe of me.

It's so damn beautiful.

 I should have been a painter, there is so much that is beautiful in me.

Years from now, when you are all dead and gone, I will be featured on National Public Radio, as poet laureate of the Atlantic Alliance of Earth, and they will beg me to read that poem.

In a voice as fine as aged oak branches, I will recite my precious verse, each syllable crossing my lips like how Garrison Keillor gives the word 'milk' a nosebreathing back massage as he says it.

When I am finished, Diane Rehm, now just an Artificial Intelligence housed in a giant room filled with punch card readers, will warble something unintelligible, and a team of 100 data analysts will read her output and tell me,

"Diane says, 'It's real good.'"

Hells yeah, Diane Rhem, it is good.