Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Run-On Sentence, Part V

 

The day after my MRI, Lara invited Alysson over for dinner during which time she spilled all her bad news, evidence of Sarah Jane’s curse. Alysson is a tall, lanky woman in her late twenties. No matter how cold it is, she wears jean capris, flip-flops, toe rings, and puka shell necklaces. As we ate puttanesca sauce over angel hair pasta and drank a Gewürztraminer high in residual sugar, Alison explained that she had a genetic predisposition for getting hernias. In fact, her older sister had had over a dozen hernia operations. In her family, hernias could erupt from just about anything—standing up, laughing, sneezing, sweeping, vacuuming, making the bed and scrubbing the floor. When her sister had her first repair, the doctor had to replace her entire abdominal wall with Marlex and Gortex because it turned out that she had fifteen hernias all at the same time. Then they put her on a prevention program. Auto-massage, warm baths, compresses, hot-water bottles. Frequent but short breaks during any sitting or standing. Two years of khatha-yoga. Her sister learned all about the Udiyanna bandha, a classic asana move and its variant, nauli. All these so-called static exercises proved useless. Her sister then tried detoxification of her abdominal cavity using vaporized urine, which she was told would compress and stabilize the area.  Despite all these measures and having a prosthetic wall all around her lower abdomen, she continued to have hernias.

After Alysson poured out her health woes, Carrie told her that I had just been tested for a brain tumor.

“When will you know?”

“The test was yesterday, a Friday, and I’m not supposed to hear from the doctor until Monday.”

“That sucks.”

“We think we’ve all been cursed by the run-on sentence,” Lara said.

“I don’t think it,” Alysson said. “I know it. I suppose I should tell you I got a call from administration. They say they’re going to have to freeze my paychecks because I don’t have my clear credential yet.”

“But you’re taking the classes just like they told you to,” Lara said. “And you’re on schedule to get your clear credential at the end of the school year.”

Their principal was working like mad to resolve the situation, Alysson said. The whole thing was asinine. After all, Alysson was voted Teacher of the Year for the entire district. It was imbecilic for the school to freeze their prized teacher’s checks.

“It gets worse,” Alysson said. “I can’t find a roommate. It’s been almost two months now.”

“It’s true,” Carrie said. “We’ve all been cursed.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Many of our problems could be self-induced. I can’t speak for you or Alysson, but I’ve been thinking about this possible brain tumor of mine. What if, in the aftermath of my failed publishing venture, I had created my tumor—actually had willed it into being—and had orchestrated the subsequent MRI and necessary surgeries in order to generate material for a new book?”

Alysson asked, “Are you really so vain that you would induce a tumor just to see your name in print?”

Before I could answer, Lara nodded her head. “He’s very vain. Worse than the two of us put together.”

Alison said, “H.L. Mencken wrote about the type of vain writer who spends his whole career flapping his wings and putting on a big show for others. I always tell my students they shouldn’t be motivated by the need to show off. They should, to take the advice of Raner Maria Rilke, only be motivated by writing that is born of necessity.”

“If it turns out,” I said, “that I unconsciously grew this tumor inside my brain in order to feed my ego’s appetite to get published, I will never forgive myself.”

“I won’t forgive you either,” Lara said.

“Would you divorce me for inducing a brain tumor?”

“Damn right I would. What kind of man wills a tumor just so he can obtain material for a book?”

Alysson said, “She’s right. It’s depraved to threaten your health and your marriage for publication. If that’s not a deal with the devil, I don’t know what is.”

“Of course,” I said, “if I do have a tumor, it’s impossible to pinpoint a psychological motivation. You accuse me of blind ambition, but it’s just as possible that I induced the tumor so that I would have to face my mortality in ways I otherwise would not. Kafka said that literature should be ‘the axe that breaks the frozen ocean.’ I imagine a brain tumor, real or imagined, can have a similar effect.”

Whatever my literary ambitions, I was relieved on the following Monday to find out that I did not have a brain tumor and that I would be foregoing neuroimaging, functional brain mapping, an intracranial neuroendoscopy, and craniotomy.   This was definitely material for a book I did not want to write. 

After I got my welcome results, I read an exposé in the Los Angeles Times by one of Dr. Leidecker’s disgruntled ex-girlfriends who revealed him to be a fraud. It turns out that he had never lived in homeless shelters during the time he had said because, as his former girlfriend could prove, at the time in question he was touring Europe in an electronic rock band under the alias of “Vector.” She had dated photographs and video footage of him playing keyboards in ale houses across Great Britain, France, and Germany. Many of the videos were now posted on YouTube and the comments were not flattering, to say the least. Leidecker’s career as an “alternative grammarian” was now officially over as he would spend the rest of his life known for being a slick-tongued mountebank.

Hearing of his demise and watching him being mocked and humiliated on YouTube warmed my heart and seemed to have a salubrious effect on my system as my tinnitus ceased shortly after. The charlatan’s downfall seemed, if for a short while at least, to restore the universe to its proper order and it seemed that Sarah Jane Reddit’s alleged curse had been broken. Alison’s hernia surgery had been a success. Her paychecks had been “unfrozen” after her principal talked to the right people. She found a new roommate, a short muscular fireman who sported, to use Alison’s words,  an “ironic mustache.” Sarah Jane Reddit dropped out of my wife’s class after her parents deemed their daughter better suited for a private academy. And most importantly, Carrie unsubscribed from Leidecker’s podcasts and disavowed his dubious doctrines once and for all.

We celebrated this fortunate turn of events over a dinner of barbecued salmon with pesto sauce and couscous with dried cherries complemented with a sweet German wine, a Liebfraumilch. We gave a toast to the end of the curse. Lara sipped her chilled wine, then said, “This is sweet.”

“It’s a Liebfraumilch,” I said. “It means mother’s milk in German. An appropriate wine as I spend the evening with a most exquisite woman.”

“You bought it because it’s cheap,” Lara said. “According to German Wine Law, the Liebfraumilch is just a cut above of their cheapest of the cheapest, the Tafewein.”

“I can assure you, price is not the issue. I bought it because I like white wines high in residual sugars.”

“I just think you like to use the word ‘residual’ all the time. A day hasn’t passed since we got married that you haven’t used that word.”

“Honey, please don’t criticize me. Tonight we are celebrating the end of our curse and the fall of Stuart Leidecker.”

“That reminds me. Can you keep that a secret?”

“What?”

“Promise you won’t tell anyone I went to Leidecker’s symposium or read his books or listened to his podcasts.”

“It will just be between us,” I said raising my wine glass.

She clicked her wine glass against mine and said, “Just between you and me.”

 

Run-On Sentence, Part IV

 

That night Lara woke me up. She said she couldn’t sleep. It was the run-on sentence. She believed it was cursed.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I exclaimed as I looked at the time of 3:24 A.M. on the digital clock radio. Lara explained that her best friend and co-worker Alison Clemson had had Lara’s student Sarah Jane Reddit but that the girl was transferred out of her class in the middle of the semester because her parents, both attorneys, had said that Alison was treating their daughter in a “draconian” fashion. The last time Alysson saw Sarah Jane, the girl had said to her, “You’ll be sorry for the way you treated me so unfairly.” Alysson thought it was an indirect threat from Sarah’s parents but it turned out to be more of a curse. Shortly after Sarah’s threat, Allyson’s persnickety roommate, peeved that Allyson had left the front door unlocked one too many times,  moved out of her Hermosa Beach apartment and for some inexplicable reason stole Allyson’s beer coasters from the coffee table. Now Allyson was in desperate need of a roommate replacement for her expensive ocean-view apartment rent.  More evidence of the curse: Three days after Alysson’s roommate had left her, her wash machine overflowed and as she was picking up her valuables to protect them from the flooding water, she slipped and broke her back. She now had to walk around with a hard plastic back brace, which looked like a white turtle shell over her clothes, for the next ten months.

And now, Lara said, Sarah Jane’s run-on sentence had insidiously snaked its way into our home. We were bickering with a pitch and intensity that matched our marriage counseling period, my ears had been damaged, my physical readiness for my imminent book tour was in jeopardy. What was next?

“Jesus, Lara. I’m the paranoid one in this relationship. When you start sounding like me, I start to freak.”

“I’m gonna get up and text-message Alison. Tell her what’s going on.”

“At this hour?”

“She can’t sleep. Not with the back pain she’s in. How are your ears?”

“Still ringing.”

The next morningLara’s prophecy came true. Jack Hiatus forwarded me dozens of e-mails from the publishers. They all “loved” Man Points and had laughed their asses off while reading it. However, from a money-making standpoint, they all feared that previous humor books they had published about the travails of masculinity had “not performed well.” It was weird how all the publishers decided to reject Man Points within hours of each other. Shortly after I received the dreaded e-mails, Hiatus called me to explain my book’s demise.  He said that one big impediment was that some of his closest publishing friends had just published several masculinity humor books and they decided during their committee meeting that they didn’t want Man Points to “cannibalize” the sales from the ones they were already committed to. Then there was the problem of my website. It was too dull in part because it didn’t utilize flash templates, which all their other authors had on their more dazzling sites. But the worse problem of all, Hiatus explained to me, was that the publishing industry is a small closely-knit community. Once word got out that one big publisher didn’t want to finance Man Points, all the other publishers followed suit like scared little chickens. Of course, the inverse was true also. If one big publisher thought Man Points was a goldmine, the other publishers would fear missing the next big thing and they’d scramble to put a handsome bid on my book. “Such a shame that didn’t happen,” Hiatus said. “Oh well, if you have any new book proposals, send them my way.”

I had no book proposals. All I had was an incessant ringing in my ears like a curse and I decided I had better make an appointment with my GP and see if I had suffered permanent damage. To my relief, my doctor reported that my ears looked perfectly healthy, and he said that the tinnitus was most likely the result of the cold I had suffered a few weeks earlier. He gave me some antibiotics, an expectorant called Pseudovent, and Fluticasone Propionate nasal spray to clear any blocked passages, but the Pseudovent and the spray made me jittery, kept me up at night, and worse the tinnitus persisted. That’s when I saw a throat and ear specialist. He said I was in robust physical shape and it was at that point that I thought we were going to wrap things up, but he wanted me to have a hearing test. A matronly woman in her forties with bifocals and dyed blonde hair escorted me into a dark booth and put two types of headphones over my ears  as she subjected me to various frequencies and a word-identification test. She gave the results to the doctor who then explained that my right ear showed compromised performance when it came to hearing the enunciation of words. He suggested I get an MRI to rule out the possibility of an acoustic brain tumor that may be impeding my hearing and I told him that an MRI would be an impossibility because I suffer from an acute form of claustrophobia, the kind where I can’t even watch movies about war prisoners digging underground tunnels without having an anxiety attack. That was no problem, he said. I could get an Open MRI and he would prescribe valium to calm me down.

Under the influence of 10 milligrams of valium, I barely made it through the MRI and now had to wait over the weekend for the doctor’s prognosis. During that time, Lara’s teacher friend Alysson Clemson had suffered more setbacks evidencing the feared curse of Sarah Jane Reddit: She had just been diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. It had occurred presumably during the time she had fallen and broken her back. Now she had to get a herniorrhaphy, which required going under a general anesthesia and  lying unconscious as laparoscopic instruments sliced into her fragile pelvic area before the surgeon inserted wafer-thin, Polypropylene mesh screens so that her intestines wouldn’t bulge past her muscle tissue.

 

 

 

 

Run-On Sentence, Part IV

 

That night Lara woke me up. She said she couldn’t sleep. It was the run-on sentence. She believed it was cursed.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I exclaimed as I looked at the time of 3:24 A.M. on the digital clock radio. Lara explained that her best friend and co-worker Alison Clemson had had Lara’s student Sarah Jane Reddit but that the girl was transferred out of her class in the middle of the semester because her parents, both attorneys, had said that Alison was treating their daughter in a “draconian” fashion. The last time Alysson saw Sarah Jane, the girl had said to her, “You’ll be sorry for the way you treated me so unfairly.” Alysson thought it was an indirect threat from Sarah’s parents but it turned out to be more of a curse. Shortly after Sarah’s threat, Allyson’s persnickety roommate, peeved that Allyson had left the front door unlocked one too many times,  moved out of her Hermosa Beach apartment and for some inexplicable reason stole Allyson’s beer coasters from the coffee table. Now Allyson was in desperate need of a roommate replacement for her expensive ocean-view apartment rent.  More evidence of the curse: Three days after Alysson’s roommate had left her, her wash machine overflowed and as she was picking up her valuables to protect them from the flooding water, she slipped and broke her back. She now had to walk around with a hard plastic back brace, which looked like a white turtle shell over her clothes, for the next ten months.

And now, Lara said, Sarah Jane’s run-on sentence had insidiously snaked its way into our home. We were bickering with a pitch and intensity that matched our marriage counseling period, my ears had been damaged, my physical readiness for my imminent book tour was in jeopardy. What was next?

“Jesus, Lara. I’m the paranoid one in this relationship. When you start sounding like me, I start to freak.”

“I’m gonna get up and text-message Alison. Tell her what’s going on.”

“At this hour?”

“She can’t sleep. Not with the back pain she’s in. How are your ears?”

“Still ringing.”

The next morningLara’s prophecy came true. Jack Hiatus forwarded me dozens of e-mails from the publishers. They all “loved” Man Points and had laughed their asses off while reading it. However, from a money-making standpoint, they all feared that previous humor books they had published about the travails of masculinity had “not performed well.” It was weird how all the publishers decided to reject Man Points within hours of each other. Shortly after I received the dreaded e-mails, Hiatus called me to explain my book’s demise.  He said that one big impediment was that some of his closest publishing friends had just published several masculinity humor books and they decided during their committee meeting that they didn’t want Man Points to “cannibalize” the sales from the ones they were already committed to. Then there was the problem of my website. It was too dull in part because it didn’t utilize flash templates, which all their other authors had on their more dazzling sites. But the worse problem of all, Hiatus explained to me, was that the publishing industry is a small closely-knit community. Once word got out that one big publisher didn’t want to finance Man Points, all the other publishers followed suit like scared little chickens. Of course, the inverse was true also. If one big publisher thought Man Points was a goldmine, the other publishers would fear missing the next big thing and they’d scramble to put a handsome bid on my book. “Such a shame that didn’t happen,” Hiatus said. “Oh well, if you have any new book proposals, send them my way.”

I had no book proposals. All I had was an incessant ringing in my ears like a curse and I decided I had better make an appointment with my GP and see if I had suffered permanent damage. To my relief, my doctor reported that my ears looked perfectly healthy, and he said that the tinnitus was most likely the result of the cold I had suffered a few weeks earlier. He gave me some antibiotics, an expectorant called Pseudovent, and Fluticasone Propionate nasal spray to clear any blocked passages, but the Pseudovent and the spray made me jittery, kept me up at night, and worse the tinnitus persisted. That’s when I saw a throat and ear specialist. He said I was in robust physical shape and it was at that point that I thought we were going to wrap things up, but he wanted me to have a hearing test. A matronly woman in her forties with bifocals and dyed blonde hair escorted me into a dark booth and put two types of headphones over my ears  as she subjected me to various frequencies and a word-identification test. She gave the results to the doctor who then explained that my right ear showed compromised performance when it came to hearing the enunciation of words. He suggested I get an MRI to rule out the possibility of an acoustic brain tumor that may be impeding my hearing and I told him that an MRI would be an impossibility because I suffer from an acute form of claustrophobia, the kind where I can’t even watch movies about war prisoners digging underground tunnels without having an anxiety attack. That was no problem, he said. I could get an Open MRI and he would prescribe valium to calm me down.

Under the influence of 10 milligrams of valium, I barely made it through the MRI and now had to wait over the weekend for the doctor’s prognosis. During that time, Lara’s teacher friend Alysson Clemson had suffered more setbacks evidencing the feared curse of Sarah Jane Reddit: She had just been diagnosed with an inguinal hernia. It had occurred presumably during the time she had fallen and broken her back. Now she had to get a herniorrhaphy, which required going under a general anesthesia and  lying unconscious as laparoscopic instruments sliced into her fragile pelvic area before the surgeon inserted wafer-thin, Polypropylene mesh screens so that her intestines wouldn’t bulge past her muscle tissue.

 

 

 

 

Run-On Sentence, Part III

My wife Lara was skeptical about my publishing venture. She said, “You’re always writing a book. It seems like every two months you finish one and go on to another. I can’t keep track.”

“Jesus, Lara. You didn't know I wrote Man Points?”

 “Oh, yeah. Is it really getting published?”

I felt snubbed at her cluelessness. I had just finished telling her the day before that my agent Jack Hiatus of The Hiatus Agency had been calling me every day for the last week to tell me how the publishers, close friends of his, were giddy with laughter as they read my nonfiction manuscript Man Points: The Ultimate Guide to Saving Your Manhood in an Era of Shriveling Masculinity. My agent said there was a lot of “buzz” among the publishers and I inferred, safely I thought, that its sale was inevitable. Suddenly, I was feeling very manly. I had marketed myself as a “masculinity expert,” touting my credentials in the book’s introduction:

In my middle-age, I studied jiu-jitsu for a year with the famous Gracie family. Additionally, I have forged friendships with Navy SEALS, British Special Forces operatives, PRIDE fighters and other combatants in mixed martial arts fighting. I have, in short, rubbed shoulders with the world’s most macho men, and I am privy to the irrational impulses, biases, prejudices, and apex predator fantasies that make up the Male Code. From these testosterone-fueled dreams, I have culled the most important elements that make up Man Points so that I can provide a guide for those who feel perplexed by the dizzying labyrinth that makes up the Man Points system.

Now I imagined the ringing in my ears would impede my ability to navigate my book tour as I took questions from fans and conducted television and radio interviews.  Furthermore, an “ear condition” and its accompanying dizziness would compromise the masculinity I needed to assert during my book promotion. When I explained these concerns to Lara, she told me I was worrying prematurely. “Didn’t you have a cold a week ago? Maybe the tinnitus is related to that.”

“So you’re denying this eardrum explosion from your Leidecker podcast is the culprit?”

“No. Of course it’s a possibility. I’m just saying we should wait and see if the ringing goes away before you start panicking about your book tour. Plus I don’t see a publishing contract in your hand. Do you?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said.

Run-On Sentence, Part II

I should have known to shut up when my instincts told me to do so. Instead, I acted like an idiot by arguing with my wife over what constitutes a run-on sentence. I said, “I’ve been teaching for over twenty years. I think I know a run-on when I see one.”

“That’s not how they teach it these days, she said. "When was the last time you took a grammar class? You’re old school.”

“The definition of a run-on has remained unchanged,” I said. Then stopping in the middle of my exercise routine, which is something I never do, I picked up Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers from Lara’s bookshelf and referred her to the definition, which states that the two types of run-ons, “fused sentences” and “comma splices,” require two independent clauses. “The student’s conclusion has only one independent clause,” I said. “Therefore, it cannot be a run-on.” But Lara was defiant. She told me to listen to her latest podcast from Dr. Stuart Leidecker, “Grammarian Extraordinaire.” Donning his trademark hobo dreadlocks and well publicized for studying linguistics while living in homeless shelters for two years, Dr. Leidecker was famous for “rewriting the grammar canon” to “make more sense in our ever-changing world” and Lara had gone to one of his symposiums a month or so ago. I was personally skeptical and even hostile toward Leidecker and his brand of “grammar,” but felt I was in a rather precarious situation regarding this alleged run-on sentence. The delicacy of the situation can be more clearly understood when I explain that grammar between Lara and me is a very volatile issue because eight years earlier when we were first dating I used to correct her whenever she started her sentences with the words, “Between you and I . . .” after which I had to explain to her that the object of the preposition between required that she say “Between you and me” as me is the objective pronoun. I made it clear that I was not normally pedantic but that I felt compelled to correct her since she was in the teaching credential program and she would be well advised to protect her credibility through a scrupulous attention to her spoken grammar. The last thing she needed during an open house was for students’ parents to catch her using the incorrect form of pronouns in her speech. However, for the longest time Lara said “Between you and I” presumably to rebel or perhaps to spite me. This problem escalated during the first few years of our marriage and eventually forced us to go into marital counseling, which was not terribly affordable for me at $150 a session. Several months and thousands of dollars later, we got over our little grammar-marital hump. But in the aftermath I had drained my checking account and harbored some residual resentment over squandering so much money over my wife’s refusal to correctly use an objective pronoun. 

And now a new grammar briar patch, a disagreement over what constitutes a run-on sentence, had raised its ugly head. Fearful of once again being forced to pay a marital therapist to assuage our grammar disputes, I felt I had better indulge Lara on this run-on sentence business. Giving up my workout for the day, I sat at her desk as she put her headphones over my sweaty ears. I then listened to Dr. Stuart Leidecker’s podcast on run-on sentences. It was his mission, he said, to expand the definition of the run-on to include the “reckless stream-of-consciousness that pervades too much of what passes for writing these days.”

As the unctuous Leidecker lectured on the meandering sentences that were proliferating in our era of e-mail and web chatting, the volume on Julia’s headphones inexplicably surged so that my eardrums roared. It felt as if someone had detonated a firecracker right inside my ears. I remember actually thinking of the word “surge” when the incident occurred because the term had been constantly used in the news and talk radio to describe a different U.S. strategy in Iraq that was supposed to put us “back on the right course.”

Overcome by pain, I cursed and with great drama flung the headphones off my head before throwing myself off the chair and rocking on the floor in the fetal position. Lara was standing over me while asking what the hell had happened.

“Your headphones just surged in my ears. My God, there’s a ringing sensation.”

“Did you hear what Leidecker said about the run-on?”

“Jesus, Lara! I’ve just suffered permanent ear damage and all you can do is continue this stupid debate? I don’t need this right now—not with my book tour and all.”

“Your book tour?”

“Haven’t you been listening to me? My book is currently going through a bidding war.”

“What book?”

What a blow to my ego. For the last week, I had been telling Julia about my book deal, but she was so absorbed in her activities that my imminent publishing success had not put the slightest dent in that brain of hers.

Run-On Sentence, Part I

My wife Lara, a sixth-grade English teacher, was grading a huge stack of essays in her office, which doubles as my yoga-combat-conditioning workout room. We were both in her office on a Sunday afternoon doing our respective duties when Lara interrupted me in the middle of the “downward-facing dog” position to tell me that I had to take a look at a rather infuriating conclusion paragraph, which consisted of one long “run-on” sentence. By “run-on,” I assumed she meant that the student, Sarah Jane Reddit, had written at least two complete sentences joined with no punctuation at all or, erroneously, with commas.  I also assumed that Lara wanted me, a community college English instructor with over twenty years of experience, to share in her exasperation and to give her some cogent advice on how to comment on the grammar infraction, so I stood up and, keeping my legs straight, I bent down and grabbed the back of my ankles to get a good hamstring stretch as Lara placed the student’s essay between my feet. I was then careful to breathe only through my nose, maintaining the proper pranayama, while I read the student’s sentence:

In conclusion, it is essential that drug laws be strictly enforced in today’s society to stop criminals in their tracks and put them behind bars not just criminals but every day people who suffer from really bad addictions and who break the law in order to do their bad behavior so that we can live in a safer better society to protect the children and for all people who need to walk the streets without these kind of worries because without these kinds of strict laws our country would be in chaos and our country’s children will be the innocent victims.

Dizzied by what I had just read,  I then stood up and began doing a hundred deep-knee-bends while holding a 30-pound medicine ball over my head. As I did so, I told Lara that the student’s sentence was an incoherent, elephantine, clumsy, half-baked brain-squirt of gobbledygook. However, I also made it clear that what the girl had written was not, technically speaking, a run-on sentence because to be a run-on there would have to be two independent clauses and the only independent clause I could identify was “It’s essential that drug laws be enforced . . .”

 What a moron I was for challenging my wife on this point because little did I know that this disagreement over what defines a run-on sentence would begin a chain reaction that would result in my near death.