'Go Fast,' He Said Rapidly

Somebody suggested a couple days ago I should write a book. I don't know. Writing books is hard work, and you don't get to be old by doing all the hard work. I'd much rather have a job like you got, involving a lot of sitting, with high pay and no stress, frequent bonuses accompanied by diminishing responsibility, and no requirement to produce anything useful except the sandwich from your lunch box.

The trouble with writing a book is filling a lot of pages with adjectives and adverbs, gerunds maybe, and an occasional split infinitive to keep your readers on the alert. What I'm saying is, you got to produce maybe 35,000-300,000 words in all kinds of different arrangements. Everybody knows this is impossible, so nobody writes books anymore.

I actually DID write a book once. It went like this:

The Book of the Too Soon Dead

"Max, new in town, came to the intersection of 'That Way' and 'This Way.' He looked at the sign that said 'That Way,' and wondered: 'Should I go this way?'

"But then he looked at the sign that said 'This Way.' He wondered: 'Should I go that way?'

"Max was not a decisive individual, which proved to be his Achilles heel and toe. You see, there was no orange juice stand at the corner of 'That Way' and 'This Way.' So it was that Max died of scurvy.

"Soon enough, people got tired of stepping over his body, and so he was eventually put into The Hell-Fire Dairy Queen and Crematory and his ashes were scattered at the corner of Starbuck's and WalMart."

~The End~

(You see the problem right away, don't you? No, no, the problem ain't that it's just a one-page book. One-page books are jut as eligible for the Pulitzer Prize as the 1200-page Guide to Peyote Buttons. No, the problem is that the book ends before I can get around to telling you Max's last name, which, once I got into a writing frenzy, I forgot. When you're getting paid by the word, it's always smart to put in a guy's last name. That's another dime, right there.)

+ + + + + + + +

You remember Swifties? Named for Tom Swift, whose adverbs of attribution always matched the character's comment:

"I'm gaining weight," he said ponderously.
"We will need some herbs if we are to cook this turkey," he said sagely.
"That gentleman has only one arm," he said off-handedly.

+ + + + + + + +

In the same vein (heh, watch out):

"A big fella like you shouldn't be afraid of a little hypodermic," the doctor said. I think he was needling me.

+ + + + + + + +

My favorite word today is shift. Vb., with evil intent. Def.: A subtle movement in bed by which you ensure that it is he who lies on the wet spot.