Back to Back-to-Back; or, Serialization of Schemes

A long time (well, okay, make that ‘about four and a half years’) ago I came to the realization that the key to keeping an online journal—and one’s fingers regularly on the keyboard in its service—is serialization: some kind of evolving plot that, like life and Stella Dallas on a diet, keeps thickening and thinning from Monday till Doomsday until the inevitable sundown that not even Guiding Light could outshine.

Despite this realization, though, I have never managed to make a success of stringing together the latest on my follies and failures, mainly because I did not set out to make my person the axis around which this less than celestial body of essays spins. That, in recent months, the revolutions have ground to a near halt and affairs have become all but devolutionary is largely owing to the series of friction that is my one life to live beyond these virtual pages. These days, writing in installments begins and ends in ‘stall,’ which is the least I tend to do best.

The cast of One Man’s Family

Not that the contemplation of the presumably out-of-date lends itself to frequent updates. I mean, what’s the point of being current when your harvest is raisins? For the love of ribbon mikes, how many times can you run away with the A & P Gypsies and still expect anyone to follow the run-down caravan in which you survey the bygone scene? Good for how many yarns are the bewildering progeny of the Happiness Boys, that old “Interwoven Pair,” until any attempt at catching up with the cat’s whiskers and its litter unravels like knitting gone kitty’s corner? Why go on circulating gossip from the Make Believe Ballroom as the world turns the radio off?

Clearly, there is room for a chorus line of doubt when I now announce the beginning of a new chapter in the cancellation dodging saga of broadcastellan. Anyone hoping for a weekly quintuplet of All My Mind’s Children should be advised that this is going to be more a case of One Man’s Family Planning . . .