Recently in Intro Category

A few years ago I was clawing my way up the corporate ladder, I took medication to quell the roiling flames of daily indigestion, I lay my head upon my desk - actually placing my forehead on the smooth, cool wooden surface - as I pondered the fate of a team amidst corporate scandals and government lawsuits.

Now I scramble to make rent, I sit all day in coffee shops without buying anything and worry someone will kick me out, I squeeze my fists so tight that my fingernails leave permanent indentations upon my fleshy palms... all to produce one or two paragraphs a day, maybe only a sentence, that tomorrow I will rewrite or reject, churning towards an irrelevant final work that no one will ever see.

Two revelations:
1) I do not know what's good for me.
2) I am, despite my best efforts, the embodiment of cliché.

But no one knows what's good for me. And, like the Theater of the Absurd, the necessary existence of a formal structure provides all the space one needs to break life into its basest, truest self.

Once: there wasn't a website.
Then: there was a website.
Then: there wasn't a website.
Then: there was a website again.

This is how the web works, a creeping change in the passive voice. To describe past states as matters of fact requires one to ignore the notion that any potential viewer percieves a different history depending on their time and point of entry. Text is mutable, content is merely form, and form has lost its once-glorious notions of essence.

Now: Here is a website.

What IS MixedMetaphors.net? Or, do you mean to ask, what ISN'T MixedMetaphors.net? Or, rather, what is MixedMetaphors.net NOT? Perhaps you mean to ask what ISN'T MixedMetaphors.net NOT? These questions could be answered easily, but it would be even easier to not answer these questions, to instead wave a piece of string and distract your attention and hope you don't notice that I never even attempted to answer these questions, although not minding so much if you notice because I'm really hoping that you don't realize you never even asked these questions in the first place, and, in fact, not really caring if you noticed that or not, because in reality I'm trying to distract myself from realizing that no one is even reading the unasked and unanswered questions anyway. Yes! That is what MixedMetaphors.net is. It's an attempt to distract myself from realizing that others don't care, an attempt to distract others from realizing that I don't care, and an attempt to revolutionize the very concept of what it means to be a human being through the subtle yet canny use of metaphor... mixed metaphor. Anything less will be considered a total failure.

Change brings both joy and pain. Without change we would be joyless and painless, we would be single celled organisms, content to endlessly bifurcate, reproducing indentical versions of ourselves forever, never mutating, never advancing, we would be perfect as we were, static and satisfied, yet painless, and, more importantly, joyless. Though, on second thought, binary fission sounds totally painful. So maybe we would have pain. Yes, we would binarily fission and we'd have no change, but we'd still have pain. Pain, it seems, comes both from change and no change. Such is life.

The point is that there has been change here, at MixedMetaphors.net. And this change has brought much pain. The site has been down (replaced temporarily by evil advertisements) as we have been upgrading. Or, rather, downgrading, since the site has been moved to a cheap, unmanaged Windows server. The site wasn't suppposed to go offline. But, alas, DNS was slow in propogating. Oh, DNS, why do you propogate so slowly? Why do you fear change? Do not be afraid, DNS, for change may bring pain, but it also brings much joy. Such as the joy of cheap, unmanaged Windows servers, humming along, providing clean and simple interfaces for doing everything, allowing monkeys to host websites. We salute you Windows, not for your ease of use, but for your monkeys. Because monkeys have much to say about change, they have much to say about pain, they have much to say about joy. We are the monkeys.

1. The MixedMetaphors.net home page will no longer contain information about recent updates, site news, or any other site related information. This just isn't the sort of service I want to provide. Not because it is time-consuming, but simply because it interferes with my webpage aesthetic. And because it seems trite. And self-referential in a utilitarian way. I will only allow self-referential content that is impractical or useless. Such as this.

2. The above item, despite strict rules to the contrary, has been altered, not for any editorial reasons, but simply because I didn't like it. It originally mentioned celery. I'm not sure why. I was attempting to be absurd, but really it was just dumb. Later attempts at absurdity, in my opinion, are more successful. If this unannounced alteration upsets you, please see the next item.

3. If you have complaints, take them up with the official complaints department.

4. There will be little or no discussion of biennial European plants in the parsley family, having edible roots, leafstalks, leaves, and fruits.

5. I can do whatever I please. If you don't like it, take it up with the aforementioned official nonexistant and completely unsympathetic complaints department, which will, for the time being, remain incognito.

6. In Holland he lived incognito as a carpenter in the shipyards of the East India company.

7. If you think I'm going to try something "clever" like misnumber this ordered list, you are incorrect. That would be cheap, cheap humor. And I won't be throwing in any "letters" either. Ha, that's just so witty. You know what? We can all count to ten. It's really not that funny.

8. If you thought that I was going to misnumber this item, simply because I ranted so much about not doing that exact thing, you were wrong. Do you really think so little of me? Numbered lists are an artform. They create a beautiful, beautiful consistency, shaping a predetermined path that we can all follow together. One is as free to break as many rules as one wants, as long as one follows the OVERRIDING STRUCTURAL FORMAT.

9. In the unlikely yet plausible event of an all-out partial failure, he could rest assured that the whims and multitudes had been counted both twice and nearly.

10. Don't cheapen it. Just don't.

11. What moves you, does it, do you know you yet do I?

You may have noticed some changes around here.

Or maybe you haven't, since these changes have been quiet and unannounced, and because, frankly, you haven't been paying attention. I'd tell you to start paying closer attention, except that I haven't really been paying attention either. And who am I to tell you to pay attention? Why should you pay attention to my website? In fact, you probably shouldn't be paying attention to my website. What are you, some kind of stalker? Nah. I'm just kidding. (Unless you really are a stalker, in which case, cut it out!)

Anyway, about those changes... If you check the site navigation, you'll see the addition of a Plog section. This is the new Playwriting Blog (Playwriting+Blog=Plog) (it's brilliant!) for the posting of occasional short plays.

Since this site has a Stories section and a Play section, it seemed that for complete parallelism it was important to have both a Blog and a Plog. One place for random prose entries and one place for random play entries. Of course, the official Fiction and Play sections are still blank because, well, in my world parallelism is of the highest priority. Before even (apparently) content.

Go Plog!

This site is not for you.

This site is, in its current incarnation (i.e. incomplete and inconsistent), more of a personal storage medium than anything meant for public consumption. It's better (hopefully/arguably) than a years worth of an empty blog. It's better (maybe not) than nothing.

I refuse to say "under construction" or "more to come" because that would be redundant. It's implied.

I refuse to make self-conscious and angrily apologetic excuses for why I'm refusing to say "under contruction" or "more to come." These days there are actually more people doing that than simply stating "under construction" or "more to come." Remember the old days when almost every site had a yellow triangle logo with a silhouette of a construction worker? Even mentioning it now seems to border on poor website design. It was undeniably redundant and lame. It was so lame it required the use of the word lame, the word lame itself being an incredibly lame word, such that in order to stoop so low as to use the word, whatever it is being describing must be so lame that it is lamer than the word lame itself. My point being: I miss those yellow triangles. Maybe I will get one. But, no. I'm not confident enough in myself to do that. Sigh.

This site will be filled with self-referential statements, such as this one.

More to come.

Damn it.