In the Beginning, There Was Balderdash...

I've heard it said that anticlimax is the warp and woof of the world. Okay, be fair, I've never actually heard anybody uttering that phrase aloud. Truth be told, I shanked it from Dan Simmons' novel "Hyperion". Why I didn't just flat out steal it and then pass it off as my own, shameless thief that I am, is beyond me. Maybe I'm just feeling a nagging little streak of honesty this fine evening. Perhaps it's some sort of subconscious attempt at bargaining with my chronic writer's block, hoping to break through and actually string together a few paragraphs that hold my gnat-like attention long enough to finally get some fucking momentum going.

Could be that, for one brief moment, truth outflanked bullshit of its own accord? Wouldn't THAT be a helluva way to start off an otherwise perfectly good load of malarkey!

But then again, that's kinda the point. Shit begins, and then shit ends, and in the middle we always seem to find ourselves wondering when it's all really going to start. Kurt Vonnegut once said that the reason that people are so unhappy is that most people tend to expect that their lives will follow the rise and fall, the peaks and valleys, and the general rhythm of a novel. And when their lives don't chart that familiar dramatic course, they feel that they've somehow failed. Obviously, the joke is that life is not and never has been structured that way. In fact, other than "shit begins, and then shit ends", life really has no consistent structure in the first place.

And, with that in mind, I'm proud to announce that The Balderdashery is open for business. I hereby welcome one and all! We're still putting some last finishing touches on the place, got a few things on back order and so forth. But y'know, belly up to the ol' bar anyway. Let's see what sorta tomfoolery we can get into.

There are no high-minded aims here, by the way. Hell, I don't even know what this place is going to end up being about, or if it will have any recurring theme running through it at all. It may turn out to be entertaining only to myself and to one or two heavily medicated souls who happen to accidentally stumble across it whilst trying to hunt down, for instance, the latest People Of WalMart photos.

But, what the hell. In this, the Age of Self Amusement, with the Internet having become a limerick-ridden bathroom wall, a peephole into the ladies' shower room, and the pool of Narcissus, all rolled into one, I may as well cast some bunkum of my own upon the waters. So, here we go…