(Parentheses)

The library is my favorite room in my apartment.  (Just so you will know how vexing my life is, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out how to bring my wife and both her joint ownership and her preference for the library into that sentence without it sounding awkward.  I did not succeed, partially due to the horrible construction of “my wife’s and my” and partially because of the lack of antecedent for the use of “our.”  I was not about to use the former, and the latter just wouldn’t do without the former, so I just gave up.  How troubling!)  One of these days I’ll learn how to write paragraphs that do not include lengthy parenthetical asides. 

Hopefully I will learn that skill while seated in my library (what a segue!).  (Speaking of segues, I thought they were spelled “segway” until sophomore or junior year of college.)  The room, as one might guess, is walled in books.  Even just thinking about it makes me joyful, but being there is “a whole nother” experience, as some would have it. 

Until this point I was planning to talk about something completely different, but now that I have made this many asides and pointless comments, I might as well talk about how much I like them.  You’ll just have to wait until a later date for my original thoughts (which I really haven’t given away at all yet).  In multiple settings, I have heard that the use of parentheses (other than for citation) is a sign of a weak writer.  My pride tells me to deny this, but I cannot.  My wife and I are unable to think of any authors who conspicuously love parentheses.  Apparently, being tangential is not something many writers aspire to. 

Yet I cannot deny my love for the aside, even a multitude of asides.  I view them as a more organized form of stream of consciousness.  They allow the reader into the twisted meanderings of the brain, the ephemeral connections elicited by a visual clue or a long-forgotten memory, the complex interactions of the current state of the writer, his environment, his history, and his work.  And yet the necessity of clarity is obvious to me because of its merits both for the reader and the writer.  A focused writer keeps the reader entranced in an idea or a story, and the further that story develops, the more the reader becomes a participant.  This generally also helps the writer by retaining his readership.  I most certainly do not want to lose all of my readers, but to some extent I also write just because I want to.  If I was entirely concerned with pleasing my reader, I would never write half of what I do, I would have a much more attractive site, and I would feel like a failure as an artist (to whatever extent I grant that blogging is art, which is certainly a stretch at times).

When it comes to writing for pleasure, the aside is one of the most enjoyable aspects my work.  I think this is because the essay than resembles a conversation more closely, or at least one side of the conversation.  Most people restrain their inner voice in conversations, though their thoughts are often more interesting than what they say.  They do not say, “How are you today?  [What is that thing on his shirt?  Is it some sort of manly brooch? Oh, no, looks like some silver paint – or maybe it is a piece of stray aluminum foil from his Moe’s burrito.] Yeah, I’m doing pretty well too.”  For the sake of keeping one’s friends, some thoughts, like the ones above, are better left unsaid.  But often we arrive at the most stimulating conversations only after a long series of less awkward tangents.

It is not uncommon for me to begin a blog on one topic and learn after a few paragraphs, as in this blog, that I really want to talk about something else.  I have a long list of jottings where I keep all my ideas for blogs, and I generally glance through it before I start writing any blog.  But despite the thoroughness of my list, which truly captures nearly all of my random thoughts for writing, nothing compares to the wide array of topics that can shoot onto the page between a couple of curly brackets once I have begun writing about one of the topics already on my list.  It makes blogging all the more exciting.

(All this time I’ve been trying to fit in this comment, but it doesn’t fit anywhere:  Have you noticed how some people put nearly everything in quotations?  They have some sort of “problem” understanding that quotation marks indicate utterances, irony, or risqué-ness, and very few other “things.”)

I will try for you, reader, to chain up the tangential tiger that lurks within me on future posts, though I will probably use weak chains, because I like it when he occasionally escapes.  But perhaps I have already begun to tame that side of me by forcing it to be a topic in its own right.  It is terribly ironic when one focuses on divergence.