55. (and)...

I love the word, "and." I love the size of it and the efficiency of it and the inclusiveness of it - the way it wants to invite more ideas to the party. I like stringing them together even though any English teacher would circle the excess of them in fascist red ink. It's not that I don't like commas, (see, there's two of them already) I suppose it's just a stylistic thing, a way to torque the rules a bit, to help my voice emerge from the vast cannon of literature (if I may be so vain).

And I love it's partner, (in my mind they're partners) the parenthetical. I love how it can interrupt an idea (like this) and can add clarity (by expounding on what's been said) or context (I wrote this entirely inane blog at 12:45 in the morning after getting out of bed to take a piss) or humor (horse walks into a bar, bartender says, "why the long face?" ba-dum-pump) or commentary (okay, that's enough examples, now move on).

Finally, I like using my own version of the ellipse (see point 9.8). It's natural habitat is the quotation but I use it whenever I need to add a conversational pause to my prose. In order to differentiate my (bastardized) version of the ellipse from the rule book version, I put the three periods in a row instead of spaced and to add literary insult to my grammatical injury, I don't even put spaces between the words around them...I just cram them all together like that (my spell-checker hates it when I do that...but what does he know?).

So there you have it (whether you wanted it or not...probably not), a brief exposition on the writing style of Randall Ajimine. If you're the anal, copy-editor type, my writing must drive you nuts...but it's how I write. It's something that's taken me years to develop and I like it. Yes, it's sloppy and bloated and a bit adolescent, but it works for me and it gets my ideas onto the page.

Okay, now I can go back to sleep.