Thursday, January 11, 2007

The haiku comes early....

Availing myself of the computing facilities at the offices of one of my employers this afternoon, I have a brief opportunity to blog - so I will give you all this week's haiku. The way things look at the moment, this may be the last you ever hear from me. I fear I am about to have to learn to live without the Internet.

I have been trying to abstain from - or at least cut down on - alcohol this month. My success so far has, I admit, been patchy; but even the effort is exacting. Hence this week's syllabically-constrained musing:


Time elongates with
Unfamiliar clarity.
Strange sobriety!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's it! NO MORE Froogville?? And I was just getting started. (by the way I came across your blog from your recent comment on another blog that I read - but I do know you, also.)

This haiku is particularly... particularly.... (I'm trying to think of something beyond exciting, interesting, and delicious...)

It is evocative of Emily Dickinson.

I think your sobriety adds to your haiku skills!

Froog said...

Ah, a back-handed compliment! My favourite kind!! (I was always a bit weak on the forehand side myself.)

So, you think all my other haiku sucked? Well, I never claimed to be a master of the form. It's just a hobby, you know.

By the by, just because the subject of this poem is sobriety, you shouldn't assume that it was necessarily written WHILE SOBER. And vice versa for my writings about being drunk. In fact, I do the vast majority of my writing during the day - indeed, mostly early in the morning - when I am stone-cold sober. I only drink in the evenings sometimes to unwind a little.

If you came to this blog via another.... well, that's a useful clue for me in trying to unravel your identity. I don't read many blogs, and I comment on even fewer. If you traced me here, I suppose it must have been another Blogspot blog, which narrows the field to 2 or 3.

Probably a '***** blog' then. You have doubtless noticed that I try not to mention the name of the country or city in which I reside. It's partly to create a certain air of excitement and mystery, a cheap ploy to generate reader interest. It's also partly to try to defer the almost inevitable day of my eventual censorship and/or deportation (since I will surely - one day soon - CRACK, and start writing what I REALLY think of the government of this place). But above all, it's because I took a conscious decision at the outset that I didn't want to become a '***** blog'. I know they're popular with people overseas who have an interest in this benighted country. I read, and enjoy, quite a few of them myself. But I do feel that even the best of them have a powerful tendency towards pomposity, self-importance, and over-earnestness - qualities which I strive to avoid. It is my modest hope that people might start reading this because of WHO I am, not WHERE I am.

(Incidentally, you are presumably aware of my [more drunken] second blog - www.thebarprop.blogspot.com?)

So, anyway, please don't mention ***** on here.

However, if you are reading '***** blogs' and you also "know me", I figure you must be in ***** too. I have a shrewd idea who you might be, but would appreciate confirmation.

If you know me, I assume you have my e-mail address - so please drop me a line to explain this 'Tulsa' thing (I might be able to get back into my e-mail account one day!). If not.... well, do you dare to reveal yourself - or at least give a few more, slightly less cryptic, clues - on this public forum??