Ad Infinitum

quirky quasi-pedantic weirdness

I could tell it was a letter from him by the exaggerated commas alone, blazoned about midway in height as the adjacent words with bulbous heads and thick flexing hooks, and as well by their munificent usage.
The man had a comma fetish, though he deplored that particular terminology; but what else can one call such gross adulation? He quizzed me once whether I recognized the most masculine of punctuations. With minimal, but some forethought, I named the exclamation-point due indiscreetly to its erect magnitude. My friend scoffed as one scoffs at a shallow child: "But think, damn you! A phallus is merely a barren muzzle in itself. The comma, inarguably, recalls a cozy sperm nestled into its own sustainable haven. How serene is the comma," he nearly wept. "Yet how imperious! And when the spartan cell has staked its claim and rights to evolution, the fetus--too languidly compressed--reflects the comma. As does the man bowed in prayer. The geezer bent with scoliosis. The adolescent exploring his own arcane affixments. All are illustrated via the same profound abstraction we find day to day in books and articles, banners, brochures, manuals. Whatever the medium, it matters not, how unconciously we obey. The comma is a subtle tyrant with the power to skew entire definitions!"
So immured was my friend's enthusiasm, he purchased a tadpole farm over the web and watched them all squiggle--like happy commas, he said; like apostrophes said a facetiously antagonistic I. But he conceded: "Apostrophes or quotations are merely, in the latter case, a dual demotion of brotherly commas."
"Demotion?" I asked, reverting, for empirical reasons, to the same tier of sanity as my friend. "But see now, don't apostrophes hover ever so bouyantly over the sodden comma? Isn't the title itself more mellifluously rich? And furthermore, might it not be prejudice to infer commas and apostrophes as the same entity, as it's prejudice to regard twin persons intrinsically identical?"
"On that last crux, you are most keen," he allowed. "And I'm compelled to agree with you if only as a means to squash your first rancid point: that audacious proposition that apostrophes 'out-grace' commas! What use are apostrophes but to the crooked politician? Ownership is petty. Dialogue is petty. How easily a masterwork could be produced devoid of their trivial squibbling . . ." And he pouted most daftly for he was a child in practice; the tadpoles all died. Maybe one or two of them managed to grow legs first.
Once an evangelist accosted him on the street with a neon-pink pamphlet that featured, of all things, a bloated comma with the incidental words God Is Still Speaking enscribed beneath. My friend, not a religious man in any conventional sense, bought the whole stack for $5 and when I visited him next, they were stapled like wallpaper throughout his studio--much to the landlord's chagrin, I would suppose--and a copy machine was lit up on the floor, spitting out legions more in that monotonous tawdry pink. Additionally, the TV was on and blaring, as was the radio. My friend explained at the shrill peak of his lungs that he hadn't the power nor impudence to disengage any of the three gadgets, as doing so would be to irredeemably supercede the "philosophy" of the comma (the pamphlets) with an abhorrent gesture akin to "periodship". Who was he to abbreviate the blathering DJ or news commentator or abort the copy machine's righteous propagation? "As you know," my friend gestured with errant, papercut hands. "I am not, in any conventional sense, a religious man. But the tile speaks Truth nonetheless!" With that, he ripped a fistful of "tiles" from the wall and thrust them into the air like confetti. "God," he went on, "if interpreted as the sentient life cycle, is forever speaking; it is as I suspected, and really, always preached. The comma is an involuntary credo. A nifty icon for the abstruse, infinitesimal annals of outer space, inner space, middle space, what have you . . !" It was around this portion of his sweaty, barechested, natty-haired thesis that I became aware of a foreign impediment trying his manner of speech, as though his tongue had swollen to an unnavigatable girth. When I queried on this--finally seizing upon a gap in his ejaculations--he smiled and stoically stuck out his tongue at me, brandishing a new blue tattoo upon the muscle's violet mass: a comma. "--For I, as a molecule of the Commatic life cycle, must never cease vocalizing either." So that was how I left him; though still after the door was shut I heard myself being addressed under the muddy roar of his media.
And now this frantic letter, which reads as such:

Dearest confidant,
I was both sorry, and enlivened, to watch you flee from my operational headquarters, for, it was clear, by the prompt certainty of your steps that they were the steps of a Saved man, an apostle for recalcitrant infinity, and I too felt my rapture renewed by yours, go, spread the word, young squire, preach, that there can be no abridging the great cycle, that death itself is trifling as any comma, in this sentence,, for are we to accept it coincidence that every religion in some, sense, extols everlasting life?, besmirch the hellish Enders!,!, let no dictum go unspoken, no homily ever be truncated,, let no epilogue ever end, no book employ a back cover, no cinematic venture bypass its stage of production, nay, PRE-production, let this letter never end, for, by my own tenets, the tenets of fixed Grammatical reality (FGR), it never must,, and so, brother in arms, await protractions of this serial prophecy, as the pious Christain awaits Sunday morn and, the insightful, infallibilities of one's transcended counsellor, you too, with your dedication, will fully transcend the illusion of finality, and, with hope, the World will follow,,

Reviews

[Rena]

Huh! What a funny little examination of the comma. A comma fetish! Your writing style feels proper and advanced. Your vocabulary is enormous and you exercise it. The only real thing that I noticed in the negative was that your characters lack contrast - it's written in the first person and the voice of the friend (the man with the comma fetish and pink pamphlets) sounds very, very similar to that of the narrator. There's not enough contrast. But the idea of it is great. It's New Yorker-y and I enjoyed reading it.