Give Us This Day Our Daily Agenda--Then Add a Surprise

At the present moment, you have only one more chore connected with your forthcoming collection of stories.  Sometime during the week ahead, you'll receive a batch of ARCs, advanced reading copies, some of which you send out in hopes of getting blurbs, others go to potential review sources.

One copy will become the equivalent of what used to be proofs, read by you to make sure the equivalent of i's being dotted, t's being crossed, periods rather than commas as signifiers that the sentence is over and does not have ambitions of morphing into something longer, more pendulous. To be sure, the publisher has a proofer assigned as well.  From your own experiences with any number of publishing ventures where you drew a paycheck, you understand how the potential still exists for some word or phrase to emerge meaning something different than your intent in writing it.

Indeed, at one point your editor wrote you a note about the ending of a story in which a character returns to the kitchen to prepare dinner after having set fire to a barn.  There are some tips of the hat to writers you admire, a notable one to Graham Greene with the title for one story, "The Man Within."  You are by all accounts an admirer of Faulkner, who has had a few barns burned during his writing career.  Yet you could think of no story of your in which you had a barn, much less a story in which you had some character or force of nature cause that barn to combust.

What to do?

You did the only thing you could think of under the circumstances; you reread the story in question, alert for typos or the materialization of a barn.  The best you could come up with was a character finding a long stub of candle, breaking it in half, then using his pocket knife to expose enough wick to burn, whereupon he lights both candle stubs before returning to the kitchen to prepare his dinner.  Don't ask about the transmogrification of candles into a barn.  You don't want to know.  You have seen enough such things appear in books of all sorts, within publishers of all sorts.

You hope to be a part of a concentrated effort to insure your stories will come forth into the world without a single typo or glitch that is the result of numerous eyes having passed over it without having caught it.  You expect some buyer will approach you after publication date either in person or via email with a comment to the effect that she or he found the following typo on page one or two.

Your goal is to take a sincere, informed shot at perfection of performance, a thing you can do.  In fact, such an attempt can be applied to the same project, each time you enter it.  You are more interested in working for perfection, which is then an abstraction, rather than achieving perfection, which is not going to make the stories any better or worse than they already are.

In a number of cultures, the performers of important rituals take exquisite pains to do what is required of them with sincerity and focus, thus, however primitive or improvised the ritual, the spiritual forces for whose attention the ritual is performed will be satisfied then provide the results for which the ritual is done.  There is a touching sincerity about such attitudes, speaking to you, a relative unbeliever in such things, of the great value of doing all things with sincerity of intent.  One culture you have some awareness of calls this approach karma yoga, which is translated to work or action as worship.

After you--still, after all these years, a dreadful speller--proof your stories one more time, then send the work back to the publisher, your production work will be finished.  You will have speeches, book signings, guest blogs to write, and other publicity-related things, which you will need to braid into your other responsibilities.

You already know the next book you wish to write, have a reasonably strong proposal, outline completed on it, and a literary agent who is eager to submit it when you have a few more chapters done.  You even know who you hope will write the introduction, and have discussed the matter with the individual, who seems excited by the prospect.

You also know of an essay you have agreed to write, and long to get started with it, aware of two novels you are eager to get back to.  You know enough about process and yourself to know how such an orderly appearance is fraught with misadventure.  This is the misadventure of a dreadful speller, a person who is not intrinsically neat, who needs to remind and pursue himself to pick up things now as opposed to some time in the evanescent future.  You need to get the unabridged dictionary off the floor and back to its shelf before you retire for the night.  You need to tend to the two corrugated paper shipping crates in which the new espresso maker was delivered.

The truth of such things may border on abstractions of its own, while yet another truth, one of process, obtains.  On this night, on this very night, you were presented with a road to follow, a road that has been blocked for nearly twenty years.  The story has to do with a group of pre-historic hunters, probably Cro-Magnons (because in the past twenty years, you've edited an authoritative book on such persons and have absorbed some sense of their self-hood), who have just returned from a hunting venture in which they have apparently been successful in bagging a large woolly mammoth.  

The word "apparently" is key to the onset of the story, also to the revelation you have experienced about where the story goes from there.  For the longest time, when you think of this story, waiting with you through all these recent events in your life, you'd begun to think of it this way:  If Elmore Leonard were to have written stories about pre-historic characters, his pre-historic characters would have been like these.  And yes, you even have names for many of them.  The protagonist, for instance, is called Lefty.

As a Matter of Fact

For all its shortness--two letters--the word "as" can create havoc with a sentence, run a paragraph off the road, and bring a story to a screeching halt.

Depending on how it is used, as, in an adverbial sense. can convey equality.  He was as big as she was.  But as can also designate specificity.  Dramatic narratives such as novellas have become increasingly popular in the last hundred years.  As can also have implications of a designated thing or manner.  As a matter of fact, she was brilliant in Hamlet as Ophelia.

Well.

As you were saying, "as" is a word to use with care.  Look at the effect it had on that last sentence, throwing two concepts independent of one another into the same short space, in effect diluting each segment or creating the written effect of the musical phenomenon of counterpoint.  As you were saying begins with the notion of you already in motion, delivering a pitch for a specific point.  Along you come, in effect tying the tin can to the bumper by introducing at this late state the need to use as with special consideration.  

As he entered the room, he couldn't see for a moment, not until his eyes adjusted to the light.  Lots of stuff going on there, and where is the reader supposed to focus?  How about, he enters the room.  For a moment, he couldn't see in the dim light.  Then, when his eyes adjusted, he saw a number of them, strategically positioned about the large, cavernous interior, their guns drawn, ready.

Counterpoint often works in music because the ear is taking in two lines of thematic material, blending them into an intriguing atmosphere of simultaneous tension and resolution.  If you could find a way to effect the same result in written narrative, you'd have accomplished something worthwhile.  Is such a thing possible?  Of course it is. 

 But would it have the same effect in a story as it would in a composition?  Hard to tell.  As it were--ah, there's that as, slithering its way in to suggest, as if it were so--the effect would help the reader rather than divide the reader's attention.   Not all that difficult to tell how, when misused, the as trope creates the  undesired dramatic condition of confusion.  The prose becomes murky.  Which line, the reader asks, shall I follow, the first part of the as parallelism or the second?

You are training yourself to look for as constructions of any sort when you are in the process of revision, questioning their right to remain, wondering, sometimes aloud, if they earn their keep.  This sense of wonder opens up other related questions, often with another two-letter word, "it."

You are often brought up short when you see the word "it" appearing in something you have written.  This troubles you because you wish with some immediacy to know "what" the it refers to, even to the point of hearing yourself think the "what" when you see it.

Since you have begun looking for as and it, you have noticed a gradual diminution of their appearance in early drafts, but, as is the case with one of your favorite all-time habit words, "and," they sometimes appear.

Such musings cause you to realize two things about your earlier associations with composition:  You took composition for granted, confident you'd get your intentions across in a way that was understandable and, you hoped, bordering on funny.  

You accepted without too much critical thinking some of the basics of composition as they were presented to you as a student.  Topical sentences.  Don't begin sentences with "and" or "but."  Try for declarative sentences,  Don't mess with the second-person form of narration.  You even accepted the concept wherein ending a sentence with a preposition is a sign that you are allowing your prose to become conversational.  Fucking well told, but at the time, you were another version of what you are now, as a matter of fact.

Your characters are derelicts from the crucible of your own politics

If your facts are at all accurate so far as the Samuel Richardson novel Pamela, (published in 1740) is concerned, early readers were outraged to discover the novel was only an invention.  

However clever Richardson's invention was, however plausible he made the plight of the young working girl in her attempts to deal with her own sexual feelings, her awareness of her social station, and the fact of her employer's son, constantly hitting on her, readers in those times were not as experienced in dealing with the potentials of fiction.  Readers were a good deal more literal-minded than they are today.

In a number of similar ways, young persons, wandering the sinuous paths of maturation, discover for themselves the vital lies, the Santa Clauses and Tooth Fairies of their various cultures, recognize the often gaping chasm between convention and reality.  These discoveries leave emotional scar tissue; they are in a major sense the awareness their elders assure them they will attain once they are grown up and have developed the capacity to build strong rationalizations of their own.

There are a number of public rituals, confirmations, quinceanarias, bas- and bar-mitzvahs, high school graduations, and the like, celebrated, often at great expense.  Leaving the individual to accommodate to the unspoken realities of convention, often on their own, with scant explanation or guidance, just as often left, still on their own, to discover from hard, painful experience.  The subtext is always the same.  You're grown up.  Now you know.  Or, now you should know.  Or, See; just as I told you.

The someday has come to pass; the someday is now.  The individual is expected to suck up reality, then get on with the process.  In some cases, there's more education to consider, experiments with romance and physicality, focus on career, perhaps even paring off with a partner, whether grounded as an individual or not.

Seeing "how things are" often brings the same sense of outraged betrayal Samuel Richardson's early readers experienced.  By this stage, the individual is supposed to remain polite about the realities, about the ways life really is.  The illusions are gone, but the emotions connected with their disappearance are often left to smolder or lapse into acceptance.

Thus the stage is set for such notable life events as rebelliousness, mid-life crisis, and crisis of identity.  Welcome to the real world, where we are asked to observe the real rules as we fox trot around the elephants on the ballroom floor.

Except that writers, poets, artists are not willing to go gentle into those particular good-nights; they recognize their anger, their betrayal.  They draw upon these and other related feelings to fuel their work, their output, their artistic voice.

This is about where you come in, as a teacher, as a writer, as an editor, but even more significant, as someone who has also been through the same rituals, has rebelled in a wild, inchoate way, and spent much too long trying to figure out what went wrong and why.  You see individuals ranging from the low and early twenties to the fifties, sixties, and seventies, all clambering about the Teflon shield, the roadblock between them and their own artistic energy.

Politeness is the last border guard, standing between the self-actualized writer and the one who thinks mere focus on the techniques of composition will be enough.

Because of some fluke of convergence or coincidence, you are at about the same place in your dealings with three different demographics, the middle-age group from your late wife's memoir class, the young twenties from the newly hatched individuals from your university group, and the assured, publication-ready group of your Saturday writers' workshop, where age has little significance, and the ability to listen to characters has great significance.

Listening to one's characters causes one to leave the ego outside the work area along with politeness, a sense of countless losses and betrayals.  Instead, there is the energy, often driven by anger or a super-heated drive of energy to get the story down without any of the propaganda, chest beating, recriminations, and desires for revenge often attending the writing of beginners.

Your characters are pre-selected by you at white-hot fury or humiliations real and imagined.  Your characters are derelicts from the crucible of your own politics, including your awareness that you may have been more an abuser than an abusee.  You do not have to love your characters but, whoever they are, you must respect them, not allow them past the first draft to leer or glare or in any way project the rebarbative nature you see in them.  They are individuals expressing what you did not dare express for fear of offending some authority figure who is not at all likely to read your book or, should she read it, she will think herself one of the other characters rather than the one of your intent.

You are not writing to get even; you are writing to grow in your ability to see implications, codes, and nuances, then bring them to the stage so the reader can experience them.  There is no need for them to carry signs, alerting the reader to their true nature, nor for them to carry adverbs and other attributions that serve as stage directions.  They know who they are.  You know who they are.  They will do what they wish, if you let them.

And always, you will let them.

Won't you?

Street Value of Life Treasures

Some years ago--at least five, with the possibility of seven or eight--your late wife happened upon s lawn sale on one of her perambulations.  She purchased a pleasant, terracotta-colored plate about the size of a salad plate, for ten cents, along with a few other cups and saucers  because of their colors rather than for any specific need of them.  These items also went for a dime each.

Over the years and the hurried nature of your departure from Hot springs Road to your present nesting place, the only item you see with regularity is the teracotta plate, which you use for sentiment and, because of its weight and sturdiness, practical serving or dining purposes.  It is, for example, perfect for breakfast toast, a dish of sliced fruit, even a wedge of cheese and a sliced pear.

You've long since begun the habit of having soft boiled breakfast eggs in a paper thin tea cup favored by your mother.  On a number of shelves about the kitchen, you see small items, vases, containers, ceramic animals, pre-Colombian art, and similar items, each one, when you stop to consider it, of some sentimental value to you as well as, in a more strictly commercial sense, of some more-than-modest market value.  Certainly more than ten cents.  Although, when you think of such things, the certainty begins to fade.

Your kitchen drawers are filled with a broad array of utensils, some you know for a fact came from your mother's prized silver and stainless sets, others from your own ventures at housekeeping, still others from your father's ventures as an auctioneer of restaurants that have filed for protection in bankruptcy proceedings.  Dining and kitchen knives, stirring and cooking spoons, varieties of dining forks, some quite old or rare (but by no means antique).  

From time to time, wondering where these might go after your use and need of them has passed, you begin estimating the total amount they might bring at a garage or lawn sale, predicated on each bringing ten cents.

Then, there are the books you rescued from the vastness of your holdings at Hot Springs Road, and the seemingly endless procession of new books, arriving in the mail, via Fed Ex, your own visits to book stores, and the reading copies of assigned books via the University.  These are in addition to the hundred or so books you used as your starting library here at Sola Street.  Although few are first editions of any worth or merit, many, in spite of how much you paid to acquire them, would bring at least twenty-five cents at a lawn sale.

Some of these are books you edited, some books you wrote, others still books you read and reread.  No one but you would attach much actual value to a Rand-McNally Atlas of the World, given you as a Christmas gift in 1942 by your sister.  No one but you would attach market value to the second oldest book in your collection, given you a brief month after your thirteenth birthday and your ritualized debut into the culture into which you were born.

In so many ways, that book commemorated not only your bar-mitzvah; it helped forge your career path.  The book is a thick compendium printed on thin pages, containing three complete novels by Mark Twain as well as numerous essays, stories, and excerpts from other of his titles.  At the time of purchase, the book could easily have been had for less than five dollars.  There is no way for you to attach a quantitative value to the book, which has begun to deteriorate in strategic places along its spine.

The worth of all these treasures is a lesson in itself.  Perhaps, from some sentimentality, your nieces and your grand nieces and nephews might wish a few of these items.  There are a few paintings by your late pal, Barnaby Conrad, that might actually find their way back to his family.  Who would want the watercolor given you by Henry Miller?

The items we surround ourselves with take on a value only we can assign.  Even if you had something your survivors might conceivably squabble over, their actual value as commercial items is suspect.  The esteem and position of respect you impart to these and other such items is their true worth.

When you are gone, some of them may have in their future visitation rights in dumps or recycling bins.  Other items might find their way into lawn sales and garage sales.  A sports jacket or two might find their ways into thrift shops.

This is, you believe, the true nature of things.  From time to time, you still catch sight of a Toyota Camry you once owned, selling it only after it had turned its two-hundred-fifty-thousandth mile, to someone for a dollar.  You see it and, you like to project, it is aware of you, once friends and confidants, now merely aware of one another in a world of dinosaurs.  The sight of the Camry causes you to consider trips you took in it, passengers who rode with you.

The sight of your treasures buoys and encourages you.  You are among friends.  Some of the items, say the pre-Colombian, were treasures for others long before you found your way onto this planet.  Some were gifts, mementos, souvenirs.  What on earth would you do with a tin box that once held fifty Luck Strike cigarettes?  Why, you'd use it to store three-quarters of a pocket knife you bought for your father from a cutlery store in New York. You'd keep a few buffalo nickels, the bottom half of a fountain pen with which you'd written the first draft of a novel, and the ink sac and nib of yet another fountain pen.

Some eccentrics have their house or apartment filled with cats.  At the moment, you have one, a notional-yet-affectionate male tabby, who appears to have forged incredible acquaintances with various of your neighbors.

All about you, there are miracles of association, targets of opportunity.

On Burn Ratios and Cold Eyes

Back in the day.

When film was the primary medium for recording motion picture and television drama and narrative, some individual, assigned to budgetary considerations, came forth with the concept known as "burn ratio."

Burn ratio is accounting at its micromanaging best.  Or worst.  The term refers to the number of frames of film a director of a project causes to be exposed and, thus, processed, before achieving what is known as the final cut or finished version.

Once again Marxist constructs enter the picture.  If a director is known as having a high burn ratio, there exists a probability he will finish his job over budget.  Yet another way in which those at the top of a pyramid victimize those at the base.  Our product would not cost so much if we did not have to pay our help as much as we do.

Burn ratio may also be applied to the number of pages a writer composes in a given time frame, compared to the number of keepable pages.

In theory, one keepable page a day will produce the rough equivalent of a book a year for a writer, which is about right, although many writers are finding they can no longer make a living from such a schedule and must plug in other activities such as teaching, reviewing, or, if there is significant background, editing.

Such metrics as burn ratios and keepable pages are in their way disturbing, although the dialectic seems to be present in many cases where profitability is a goal for the producer or publisher.  With your political philosophies in form place, you continue to be interested in earning the greater bulk of your living from your writing, with the stipulation that this living be on your terms, another way of saying you are neither a fine arts writer nor, as you once were, a writer overt in his commercialism.  

You would be thrilled beyond your ability to express such pleasure if you were able to live with modest comfort on the basis of what you write.  On the other hand, you are thrilled to be able to write at the level you now write, hopeful of never reaching the point where you think of yourself as having reached the peak of his powers and the maximum strength of his vision.

Your recent experience in dealing with editorial queries and notes relevant to short stories you'd already published  has reaffirmed your belief that you are in fact on a progressive curve, more hidden things leaping from the rereading and attention to notes than you'd have imagined.

Working at this level has long since caused you to redefine what constitutes a successful day's work.  For certain, a successful day's work cannot be measured in words or pages written.  For one thing, you'd have no idea how keepable a particular page or scene was, not until you'd had time to, as Yeats put it, "cast a cold eye."  Yeats was talking about life and death; he was even writing verse for his own tombstone.  Not to argue with Yeats, you do believe on casting a cold eye on life and death, but you're talking about casting a cold eye on what you wrote yesterday or last week or last year.

Something may be wanting a fixing touch from you; something you may not be able to see until a colder time.

Such aspects of the process, although they cause you increasing sessions of work, with more story coming forth than product, amuse you because of the effects on the schedulers and direct-consequence persons who like to grade potential on the basis of schedules met, pages delivered.  Your burn ratio is unknowable, even when a project seems to have run it course.

You are not only a better writer for it, you are a better reader, and a more observant editor.

Two Words--Not the Two You'd Think--That Have Messed up Culture and the Way We Write

Your job as a writer is to peel onions, remove each layer with care. Some onions are easy to peel; they produce none of the tears associated with onions.  Other onions require deliberation and patience to make sense of the resulting pile of onion peels.

Each layer represents an integral part of a story or essay, some aspect, some element that will send you off to the dictionary or library or perhaps off on some individual flight of fancy to a part of you well below your immediate awareness.  After all, if a story or essay holds no such challenges or questions for you, how can you expect readers to follow suit?

You'd not peeled too many layers off the onion of social strata before you became aware of the directions your preferences took you.  You were a child of your culture and time, after all, educated enough to have a sense of class distinction.

Now, as you write this, you are still of your culture and time, but you have managed to educate yourself to a perspective where you have in fact extended the horizon.  You can see more, have more serious conversations with your preferences and your prejudices.

Your preferences were formed in significant measure because of your growing distaste for and mistrust of those tiers referred to as "elite," "Upper-class," and, because you'd had enough reading of history, "ruling classes." To a large extent, you seethed distaste for these tiers.  Now, you have not grown fond of "them," instead, you observe with a cold eye, observing and, yes, truth to tell, watchful to see if any traces of "them" appear in the "you" that is you.

You are from yet another culture than mere "middle-class" or "working-class;" your "other" culture had you during those earlier years where there was a concentrated effort to cause your extinction.  This concentration reminds you of your frequent association with gophers and attempts to avoid them or remove them.  This same concentrated effort reminds you of times when you or someone close to you sought to remove populations variously of ants, fleas, and ticks.

To that effect, you can still recall the time and place of your best friend's mother, telling you how fortunate for you that you lived in Los Angeles as opposed to certain cities and countries in Europe.

This could well have been the genesis of the "them" and "they
 who were not so much out to get you as to exert authority over anyone not of their own kinship and turf configurations.

Soon, you made another discovery from a dictionary, when you sought clarity about the origins of the word chivalry.

"Does this mean," you asked a middle school teacher, "that chivalry is based on the class distinction between persons who have and ride horses and persons who do not have horses and must therefore walk?"

"I guess you could say that," the teacher responded.

"You guess?  Don't you know?"

"I'd never thought of it in those terms."

This was not the so-what approach you'd hoped for, which probably explains why you were soon in the outer office of Mr. Engberg, a bony, likable enough man who was Boy's Vice Principal.  You'd spent enough time there to know the drill; you'd be assigned a list of new vocabulary words to be learned and defined in a subsequent visit.

Mr. Engberg seemed intent on suggesting you not try to look at everything in terms of class struggles, although, because he impressed you as a decent and concerned person, you continued to question his line of thinking without appearing your usual, querulous self.  Years after the  fact, you do tend to see things in terms of class struggles, which has made you appear to be a Communist, which you are not, although in a realistic sense a Marxist, which approaches a description for you.

The most recent word with which you fell into a confrontation is "villain," long associated in your mind with someone of malevolent intent, say Satan in Paradise Lost, but not necessarily the Satan of The Book of Job.

The word villain seemed too dated to you when you began to teach literature and writing.  You cannot take any credit for switching from villain to antagonist in your lectures, written notes, and general thoughts about story.  The academic, Frederic Jameson, got you to a point of curiosity about villain, whereupon you checked the etymology of the word, a search that brought you information, a certain amount of surprise, and a brisk palm, slapped against your forehead as a sudden reproof to your naiveté.

The earliest meanings of villain take us to such tropes as "farmhand," "rural person," or unlettered, uneducated, or working class.  In that sense, being "of" a "villa" is not so bad on its face, but class structure being what it is, villainy took on the meanings evolved through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early portions of the twentieth century.  A villain meant malicious intent against persons of chivalrous--and no, you did not put that word to emphasize your point.  You used that word because it was part of the printed definition.  

In a sense, everyone under the rank of a knight was a villain.  Thus two words, chivalry, from the French for horse, and villain from the French for a person who worked at a villa, have become subtle markers of class distinction, influencing our literature, our social outlook, and the way we define behavior in general, education and its lack, and class distinction.

Your sympathies are clear; they go to the working classes, even though you can find as much to disagree with there as you can with educated classes and your scant association with upper classes.  Being a writer has marginalized you, sent you to the gulags and Siberias of your own cultures.  But you are able to accept this marginalization without bitterness, certainly without envy.  You were fortunate enough to have had a mentor who gave you the metaphor of being the Mars Probe, going to places beyond the horizons of convention and possibility, gathering information, then sending back reports.

Flocking Pigeons

High on your list of preferred contemporary authors is the Irish novelist and critic, John Banville (Wexford, Republic of Ireland, 1945--).not only for his imaginative stories but for his use of language.

By any account a well-educated man, a writer of considerable force and ability, Banville has a vocabulary that sends you skittering to the dictionary with some regularity.  His education does not cast him as an academic writer, although it does provide him with the considerable skills necessary for a reviewer, which he is, notably for The Irish Times and The New York Review of Books, nor do you find his narrative style in any way overreaching or weighed down by the heavy, Latin tropes of academic writing.

If anything, there is a certain pugnaciousness about him as manifest in his prose, giving the impression of a habitue of a Dublin pub, challenging all comers to contests of words, drinking of Guiness pints, or a table of snooker.  You are eager to get your hands on Banville's latest, Black-eyed Blonde, a novel in the style of the mystery writer, Raymond Chandler, whose The Big Sleep was written seventy-five years ago.  With the addition of a few things such as cell phones, the Internet, and computers, The Big Sleep could hold its way with works being produced today by such writers as George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and James Lee Burke.

You are as fond, if not fonder, of another Irish writer, Colm Toibin (Enniscorthy, Republic of Ireland, 1955--).  Even though Toibin does not write detective novels, his short stories are filled with the kinds of searing revelations found in yet another Irish writer, James Joyce.  Toibin's novels carry the unmistakable traces of his having read and respected Henry James.  He is in his way as provocative and insightful as Banville, definitely educated and thoughtful.  

The edge to Banville's reviews and novels is combative, causing you to regard him as the Irish equivalent of the writer Mailer wished to be.  Toibin's edge is more reflective of the cultural ties that impede them as well as motivate them toward risks beyond their apparent capacity to endure.  Toibin's people are often raw from wounds endured in their childhood or coming of age.

You identify with Banville in the matter of vocabulary.  An editor only today asked you why you didn't say "journey" or "flight" as opposed to the word, "hegira," you used.  This will not have been the first time such queries have appeared on your manuscripts.  

You manage to catch your two most significant habit words, "and" and "accordingly," the first because it causes sentences to sound lugubrious, more complex than the circumstances in your stories dictate, the accordingly because it is an adverb, but also because it has become somewhat of a throw-away phrase meaning "as a result" or "as a consequence."

You do not consider apt, terse words that seem to you to capture an intended meaning in fewer rather than more words as an equivalent of habit words or of seeking to bludgeon readers with a display of vocabulary.  You think nothing of an automobile or plumber mechanic having tools to do the job.  When you arrive at the dentist to have your teeth cleaned, the array of picks, curettes, and probes assure you rather than intimidate.

The editor who queried you on hegira also wondered what you meant by the expression "shot his cuffs," then added another query, "Do you mean wallet?"  No, you meant breast fold.  "Do men still use breast folds?"  You felt like sending him a screenshot of breast folds for men, but you simply said yes, you have used a breast fold for over thirty years.

Disclosure:  You did at one time set out to round up and tame a considerable herd of vocabulary, thinking this would draw attention away from your apparent lack of intelligence.  True enough, you were able to see at first hand how some words, seeming to have been pulled out of rare, exotic literature, have a distancing effect, which is not at all what you want.  But time has brought you to better terms with that issue.  Now, your interest in vocabulary has to do with your love of puns, words and phrases that sound like other words and phrases and which produce a sense of disconnect associated with the pun.

One single, simple example of the pun in action could be the result of saying to a clothing designer "Frock you."  Or perhaps the more genteel, "Ah, I see you're all frocked up."  

Yes, puns in their own way can become as distancing as the vocabulary of showing off.  You are in effect playing word games much of the time, not the least of which when choosing titles for these blog entries.

Words as tools becomes a trope of great concern for you.  There is always the hope that with enough tools, you can put together a narrative style that will carry your ideas and concerns to a destination of clarity and accessibility.