Summer Hiatus Series: Nine Years & Counting---The Challenge of Writing A Weekly Column

                  "Time, time, I have no time! and it's driving me out of my mind!"

Yes, that's it, that quote, quoting myself capturing my situation as I have no time to adequately accomplish anything, making this achievement of writing 468 plus taxi articles without missing a week miraculous and special, saying much about both dedication and allegiance to a cause,  conviction prompting me to weekly take the time to sit down and tell everyone all about it, even if you truly don't want to know.

But it isn't easy, trying to make this subject, taxi, fresh and interesting and not tedious week after month after year.  And perhaps even more challenging is ensuring that my prose meets the highest standards, too often disappointing myself when I know my prose styling on a particular day is crap, and despite all efforts remaining what it is: barely a small step above the lexicon rubbish bin.

And the reason is fatigue, I am tired, translating into exhausted prose collapsing upon the page.  Having read much JB Priestley, Willie Morris, Willa Cather, Earnest Hemingway, Virginia Wolff, Anita Brookner, Robert Graves, Raymond Carver, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens I know what good and effective prose is, meaning my standards are high and when falling below what I know is acceptable I am not happy, no, not at all.

Taking last week's article concerning the ongoing madness at Sea-Tac as a good, bad example, my words swollen, over emotional raindrops splattered upon the page, blurring and smudging the text.  And yes, I was fully aware when I was writing that I wasn't at all pleased with my composition but felt helpless to do much about it, a poor swimmer just struggling to make it safely to shore.

What does working like I have the past five days, days filled with trademark attorneys flying from one scheduled event to the next, do to the literary mind in its brave attempt to form coherent and eloquent lines into grand sentences and paragraphs encompassing the well executed essay?

Nothing good, I can assure you, execution the proper descriptive, all this taxi nonsense killing the writing mind---words, words, all my words translating into unintelligible gibberish, sentence structure weighed down and mashed by repeatedly doing too much of nothing over and over and over again, all my well-intended phraseology mechanically softened turnip insulting both taste and sight, indigestible and bad and destined for the overheated compost heap, natural manure not for reading but for the growing of  garden vegetables.