An Unfamiliar Method

 

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I tried to write this using a method that was unfamiliar to me. I wrote the first sentence, only to discover it was, in actuality, the second. So I went back to square one and wondered, should that be capitalized, as if Square One were a place name? It doesn't really matter, does it? Anyway, I was unfamiliar with the method, so I had no idea whether I was doing it correctly. Still, I soldiered on. Well, I carried on, I don't know if I really soldiered on—matter of fact, what exactly does it mean to soldier on, in civilian life, that is, to carry on as if a soldier? I carried on, but I was nowhere, man. First of all, I was unfamiliar with the method, and when I'm unfamiliar with the method I get freaked out, so yeah,

 

I freaked out,

 

am freaking out,

 

am freaking out now,

 

but pay no attention, I think it's a by-product of the method. Or at least that's how I calmed myself down and kept on keeping on, so to speak.

 

So I get here, to this point, here I am, I don't even know where I am, having kept on, carried on, soldiered on after having been stymied by an unfamiliar method. Stymied? Really it was more like an inconvenience, the inconvenience of having to cope with an unfamiliar method. If I had a familiar method at my disposal we'd be there already, but here, wherever we are, I have no idea where we are because I'm impeded by an unfamiliar method, I have no idea. Not that I'd necessarily be unimpeded by a familiar method. I remember (and here I have to laugh), oh it must have been a good fifteen twenty years ago, when I was impeded by the most familiar of methods, as familiar as my right arm, one might even say, which I've been known to lift on command, on occasion. It was quite an embarrassment, I must admit. There I was, the odds-on favorite, it being well known how intimately familiar I was with the method, it not being known that, the familiar method being out of my reach, I had to resort to an unfamiliar method; flubbing it, there's no other way to say it, flubbing it—I tried blowing it, but blowing didn't sound right, not right like flubbing, so flubbing it would have to be—would have made me a laughingstock, an object of derision and opprobrium, the Village Idiot, as it were, no, that shouldn't be capitalized, village idiot, no.