Yep, the state of the onion is stinky. The great onion that is our world is hyuge. And it tastes like an onion. Especially if you eat it from the inside out. Mmm… I love onions. I want to eat them all myself, every onion in this garden. But if I am going to do that, I am going to need the support of all sides. Yes, there is blame to go around on many sides. But I need their support to get rid of all the dietary restrictions illegally placed upon our garden by the last onion-master-in-chief. That illegitimate onion-master was not even raised in this garden. He seems to think that everyone has a right to clean, pesticide-free soil to plant their roots in. But all garden vegetables are not created equal. Tomatoes are poisonous. They all have radical religious beliefs that makes them hate our onion-ness. They are therefore terrorists, believe me. They are trying to sneak across the southern border of the garden and take over the onion-growing space that good, conservative, right-thinking onions have and need more of. They are trying to spread their poison in our garden. They want to replace our onion laws with their own stinky Tomatillo Law. And corn. The Corn Party tries to defeat every item on the onion agenda. When we pass a law that all corn voters need to be stripped of their kernels before they can be allowed to vote, they selfishly vote against that law. Government in this onion garden cannot work if they continue to do that. And we need a wall to keep illegal jalapenos from crossing the garden’s southern border. They are not the best vegetables, I guarantee you. They are onion-eaters and foul mixed vegetables. And promises were made to spring onions that were brought into this garden as seeds and now are crying that they deserve not to be uprooted and thrown into distant gardens where they don’t even speak the proper vegetable languages to get by. I know this garden loves those onions. I love those onions too. I want to eat them too. They are very nutritious. But their protections are now gone. I leave it up to the Corn and Onions of Congress to build that wall, and if they do, I will let the spring onions stay.
And now you can heap praises on me for the state of our economy. Yes, I take credit for all the fertilizer I have created by speaking tons of bull manure every single day. The quality of my manure is fabulous… simply fabulous, believe me. It is the finest manure any garden has ever received. And I, Donald J. Onioneater, am the finest onion-master you have ever seen. No onion-master before me has done as well, except maybe for Abraham Limabean. He was pretty great. Although I don’t really know why. Maybe I should have said Andrew Jackfruit instead. So the state of the onion is stinky. And let’s all work together now to MAKE THE GARDEN GREAT AGAIN!
Reading Other Writers
Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else. It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own. You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.
And not every other writer is Robert Frost. Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s Gene Kelly. There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding. What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease? And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter? Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”? I think it is. Trolls are not smart.
I know people have to make an effort to understand me. When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head. In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it. See what I did there? It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense. That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures. If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire. I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues. But most people don’t. Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point. For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom? For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom? Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub. I know. I tried to stuff her in there for this picture. And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?
When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things. I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well. I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better. And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words. I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Thank God for that! And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot. And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value. It is always worth doing.
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