THE UNGREAT COMMUNICATOR

Even readers struck by my occasional flashes of coherence, are often confounded by my random punctuation. Allow me to clear this, up.

In the eighth grade I nearly flunked English and shortly thereafter, killed my teacher, Mr. Mizer.

Well before his untimely death, Mr. Mizer recognized that I was not grasping any of his grammar lessons -- and due to a peptic ulcer, he didn't suffer fools gladly. Mr. Mizer is not suffering anymore, and if he could overlook my complicity in his demise, I know he would be proud that I went into "journalism," or what passes for it these days.

I didn't shoot my mentor or anything. I killed him one misplaced comma at a time. Like bullets to his already compromised digestive system, my comma placement pointed out my complete and utter misunderstanding of the phrases and tenses that make English so beautifully and unnecessarily complex. He didn't see my future-past-perfect going anywhere.

Once, like a ski instructor taking away your poles, Mr. Mizer took away my commas and forced me to write shorter sentences without them. I substituted semi-colons; colons: and dashes -- in their place. My second sentences still started on the second page.

Because of my lack of promise, Mr. Mizer never paused to teach me where to put semi colons; or colons: he must have known he was not long for this world. My spelling was fonetic, and my vocabulary, dead on arrival.

I was particularly bad at Capitalization. Brought up to respect Authority (and fearful of being Jailed) I would Capitalize any word that sounded Officious.

While my unparallel tenses helped me in quantum physics, they left my English paper awash in red ink. Mr. Mizer told me he would spend half his evening correcting my pop quizzes, and the other half popping antacids.

Mr. Mizer wanted my parents to have me tested, but in those days you weren't dyslexic or autistic --you were lazy and stupid. Why go to high-priced doctors, only to have them write "Lazy and stupid" on a prescription pad?

Later in high school, when they knew more about learning disorders, I was tested and everyone was delighted to find out I really was lazy and stupid.

I did better in reading comprehension, though Mr. Mizer often wondered what book I was reading. Ethan Fromme was not about the perils of sledding in suburbia, he pointed out in the margins of one paper, though he liked the fact I had transposed Ethan Fromme's character with my own.

Since the terrible sled accident book-ended both Edith Wharton's novel and my synopsis, Mr. Mizer incorrectly concluded I had finished the book. In fact, I had read only the beginning and ending. I was proud of my "D+," however, it being the highest grade he had given me all year.

Sadly, both Ethan and Mr. Mizer were forced to live painful, unrequited lives, while I went on to write two books that curiously sold 78,000 copies (parenthetically,100,000 is a best seller), not to mention a magazine column read by past and future presidents. There is no justice, except that writers -- both good and bad -- die poor. So where's the incentive?

Anyway, for what it's worth, I write short tall tales.

Obviously, a vast sector of our illiterate populace doesn't get too precious about their language. The King's English never sounded right to me, and though my father was a fine English teacher and a good Democrat (who was forever correcting me), the message I kept getting was:

"A mangler of the English language will become president -- and you will write bad things about him."