Sorry for the silence, friends. I haven’t been in the proper state of mind lately to post something worth reading up here. After this kind of dry spell lasts for more than two weeks, I start to get nervous. I feel like a desperate rent-a-clown at a children’s party scrambling to put on a show for an entire afternoon with only twenty minutes’ worth of material. Maybe I’ll just squeak this red rubber nose another dozen times and see how that goes.

Anyhow, in an effort to keep my blog alive and interesting for anybody inclined to visit this sleepy patch of gray on the internet, I started digging back into my old writing journals for some previously forgotten gem. I didn’t come up with much this time around, but I did walk away from this exercise with a renewed sense of humility in the face of my undeniable lameness. I mean, goddamn, I actually used to write like that? I actually thought that sanctimonious load of crap I was working on was good when I wrote it ten years ago? I look back at my feeble attempts at poetry and prose from the past, and I just want to approach me in an alternate dimension and punch myself in the face.

I hope I encounter myself as a five-year-old in this alternate dimension so that I can throw a punch without having to worry about any meaningful retaliation. That will teach me for wasting my own time with that unpublishable crap.

Posted by KZ on 02/24/09

While roaming the streets of coastal Bay Area town one weekend, I spotted a delivery van for a seafood distribution company with a particularly terrible marketing slogan painted on its side:

Ugh. Grammatically speaking, the ellipsis (those triple dots, “…”) can be used to either insert a pause into a statement, to trail off thoughtfully from an unfinished point, or to indicate that a word or a phrase has been intentionally omitted from the original text. In the context of this slogan, there really isn’t a legitimate grammatical reason to use the ellipsis as a pause. “Our quality is your reputation” is all that needs to be said, so why bother breaking up the rhythm of the sentence? Dramatic tension? Anybody who would be even remotely excited and titillated by this cheesy and grammatically deficient sentence structure would have to be living a sad and bankrupt life marked with loneliness, light jazz, and a surplus of knit booty socks for the legs of their end tables.

Having said that, I have no choice but to conclude that something has been omitted from the original slogan. My question then becomes, “What exactly does this company have to hide?” They’re clearly hiding something, judging by that guilty looking ellipsis staring at you from the midst of all that italicized intrigue. The following is a list I created of some of the possibilities for the original slogan.

• Our Quality, Motherfuckers, is Your Reputation
• Our Quality, Mein Führer, is Your Reputation
• Our Quality, Lord Xenu, is Your Reputation
• Our Quality, Emperor Kahless, is Your Reputation
• Our Quality, You Dirty Minorities, is Your Reputation
• Our Quality Fish Flavored Soylent Green is Your Reputation
• Our Quality Crack-Laced Crab Cakes is Your Reputation
• Our Quality Four Dollar Hooker Service is Your Reputation
• Our Quality “Happy Ending” Massage Program Involving Fish is Your Reputation
• Our Quality Control Program, “Leave No Dead Fish Unfucked”, is Your Reputation

I’ll be polite and stop it there. But you have to admit, it’s kind of fun dreaming up all of the possibilities for the original slogan. Submit one of yours in the comment box today! You’ll be glad you did. Hell, you might even be included as a defendant in the inevitable defamation lawsuit coming my way. That’ll be an interesting day.

Note: The moral of the story is to never use the ellipsis irresponsibly unless you’re prepared to live with the consequences.

Posted by KZ on 02/06/09

Some friendships are meant to be remembered, and some are easily forgotten. But then there are some friendships that have a way of inflicting themselves on you. They grasp you by your guilty obligations, your quiet frustrations. Private notions of loyalty and compassion degrade over time, varnished by a silenced eternity of stifled resentment. These are the kinds of friendships that plague you long after their logical conclusion. This is a form of friendship that I often wish I’d never known. For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the ghost of a friend who refuses to die. He shot himself in the head like an asshole.

I never asked him to shoot himself in the head, and he never asked me if he could dump his collection of scribbles on me. He just woke up one morning and decided to do both of those things, and now I find myself inexorably linked to the most obnoxious corpse of a pest who ever wielded a pen. How’s that for a eulogy, Ben?

Until the day he died, I’ve endured Ben’s friendship for years. Now that he’s dead, it’s a little disconcerting to realize that not very much has changed. Ben is the one who shot himself, but here I remain, the walking dead, with a conspicuous bloody hole in my head. It offends the senses and dulls the sentiment. Just a bit. I am not him, but he is me.

Posted by KZ on 02/06/09