Gone for so long

It has been noted by some that I haven't posted in more than two months. This is not how to maintain a loyal following. I suppose I could fill everyone in on all the details of everything that has transpired over the past two months but please spare me the details of all that I really don't want to read such stuff. A random comment: When I was young I was in love with Sophia Loren. Random comment 2: I never had the chance to meet her. I've never met anyone famous in the entertainment sort of way. I once got drunk with Edward Albee who later invited me to his Writer's Colony on Long Island and I was too young, too arrogant, too stupid to perceive the opportunity when it lay at my feet. I still have a hard time to keep from self flagelation when I consider the time that has passed and that I'm now trying in the desperation of chronology to recover that which was lost which is why I may appear foolish at times, or somehow anachronistic (damn the clocks). Item: On my private bulletin board hang the plans for a 16' sailing barge that would sleep two and would be useful for cruising Lake Erie, slow but steady. On the same bulletin board hang the contests I sent the novel exerpt to and in my fantasies I win to fame and glory while the reality will reveal itself with SASE rejection slips. Item: Beneath the gentle, caring exterior lies an arrogant ass. Watch the last 15 minutes of Hunt for Red October. Comment: Rye whiskey makes the best Manhattan Cocktails, not Bourbon or Canadian. Scotch makes a different drink altogether. Angostura Bitters is the closing touch, that plus a marichino cherry (one of the few grocery items carried by the liquor store). Item: Olga Bergstrom had a recipe for Christmas punch that included: rum, gin, whiskey, lime juice, lemon juice, pineapple chunks, marichino cherries, and something else that escapes me at the moment. The fruit absorbs the alcohol and is a delightful snack for the children. The punch is served diluted with seven-up. Comment: before there was writing there was story telling and the shamans showed the pathways into the caverns of death which end in the realm of life. Then the writers put the stories to poetry for the sake of memory (Illiad, Odessy, Beowulf). The invention of writing ended the need for memory and improvisation locking the tale through pen and ink. Guttenberg merely cemented an ancient process. The computer does nothing but the same, divorcing speaking from writing, reducing it to taps upon electrical connections of the keyboard.
Item: There exists an internet program for the composition of flash fiction. Fill in the blanks for the names, the nouns, the verbs, the modifiers, push the button and zip out comes a ready made story. Comment: Since writing can be so formulaic, why bother with imagination? Item: Maso seeks to do to literature what Abstract Expressionsism did to painting: the reduction to the elements of the story. Comment: Why has writing come along so late to join the artists? Writers are the Midwesterners of the creative concept: twenty years or more behind. It begins in Europe, then twenty years later arrives in New York, then twenty years later settles into the mid-west, already old hat. We still are wrestling with Ezra Pound. Finale: I've made up for lost time. Semi-autobiographical writing carries two dangers: comments on the writing, and comments on the writer. Best stick to iguanas.