Women gladiators, defend us from history!

As usual, I suggest that you read this week's Heydays column before continuing to read this blog entry. Once again, your country calls you to action. After you brave souls navigate away from this page, only some will return.

Only some will return.



Sorry for the late update, but there's a very good reason for my tardiness. Right at the outset I'm going to admit that this week's Heydays doesn't give me a whole lot to work with. Ed plays it pretty straight this week. This week's column is largely a respectful, elegiac tribute to fighting men and women, the Fourth of July holiday, and Ed's memories of army training. All subjects which, much to my chagrin, are actually related to each other. No extended tangents or bizarre stream-of-consciousness chains of barely-related topics. No charmingly anachronistic bits of racism or sexism, or hopelessly outmoded cultural references. No insane mixed metaphors or uncontrolled bouts of synaesthesia.

Instead, we find the rarest of animals of the Heydays genus: a column that actually makes sense, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Along the way, there are certainly some distinct Hayes-isms, but nothing that rises to a level that requires my usual work of meticulous mockery and incredulous deconstruction.

There is a possibility that I am now so used to reading Ed Hayes' writing that his sensibility has slowly but surely invaded and colonized my unconscious, and I am no longer able to detect the symptomatic gaffes and peculiarities that make his work so painfully (un)readable. If this is the case, then this blog will have to end, or someone more qualified (read: someone whose unconscious hasn't been insidiously permeated by the consciousness of an 83-year-old retired Sentinel sports page editor) will have to take over for me. I hope that this isn't the case, but one must always be prepared for the worst. Perhaps interested parties can post a link to a resume and cover letter in the comments section, and I will review for possible stand-ins or permanent replacements.

In the meantime, here are just a few things I noticed in this week's strangely sensible and mostly readable (though still excruciatingly boring) Heydays column:

• "We've had our share, oh yes, the roaring Revolution, the shameful Civil."
  

I do find it odd that Ed, in his haste to make sure no opportunity for superfluous and distracting alliteration is ever passed up, sees fit to call America's fight for independence "the roaring Revolution," which makes it sound like the name of a black-tie event in The Great Gatsby, rather than a brutal war against tyranny and monarchy. Ditto for "the shameful Civil," a war over which I feel absolutely no shame whatsoever. North vs. South, emancipation vs. slavery, federal power vs. state's rights. These seem like good enough conflicts upon which to base a war. It's as good as any, really. It seems somewhat less shameful than waging war over abstract ideas such as "spreading democracy" or "ending terror."

Not to wax political, but someone must, as Ed (as per usual) scrupulously avoids any kind of concrete political statements, in favor of tired homilies that seem conservative merely by default. For a second it seems like Ed might be criticizing the "old men encamped behind computers" who send the young to war, but then he calls the war "a noble cause." It seems like we're back at square one, but Ed follows this by throwing his hands up and wondering aloud: "One day, perhaps, history books will explain what that noble cause is." So, I'm confused on where Ed stands. And so is he, probably.

There are a few unnecessary Hayes-ian word substitutions that call attention to themselves. I noticed "foreign properties" instead of the usual "foreign lands," "gladiators" rather than the perfectly acceptable "soldiers," the very stupid-sounding phrase "multitude of blokes" rather than the more comprehensible and less stupid "thousands of men." Once again, Ed thinks that these "clever" substitutions constitute style, when really they just make his prose sound awkward and stilted. I think we can safely say that if a guy who has been writing professionally for the majority of his 83-year life hasn't yet learned this simple lesson, he's never going to.

But really, I am once again faced with the inconvenient truth that this week's column just isn't all that bad. Rather than belaboring a few minor nitpicks, I'll just cut this week short, and ask that you all join me in a few moments of silent contemplation, during which I humbly request that you pray to the gods of dementia and senility that next week's Heydays will once again provide a deep toybox of unintentional surreality and bizarre linguistic gymnastics. In Alzheimer's name we pray. Amen.