Tales of a Bionic Testicled Shoe Shiner

BLOG: AmmoHammerBite!Bite
AUTHOR: Ryan Lawson -- Presumably from Hamilton, Ontario, but I could very well be mis-surmising.

And, to be honest, I do not know how to begin.

So, let me start from the beginning. From what I would consider a rather inauspicious and mundane initial foray into the world of syntactical drivel, Ryan Lawson brings to us a blog of, primarily, stories. Some seem to be fantastical retellings of real interactions that he has had. Some appear to be attempts at self-reflection and at times I would wager self parody. And some just appear to be the output of a tremendously offkilter mind.

There's not a lot of that personal touchy-feely stuff you get in other blogs. Even his telling about the birth of his child doesn't really carry any implicit understanding that this actually happened or even what being a dad means to him. Only by reading the introduction did I even know that such an event had actually occurred.

His design invokes the feel of a comic book or an e-zine, and the content lives up to that invocation.

He is clever. At times, he is possibly too clever. In general, I applaud his creative vocabulary, but at times, he seems to be interested in showing off how well he knows how to work a thesaurus rather than trying to tell a story.

Look at me, picking such nits. Face it. When Ryan is on, he is really on. And if he misses once or twice, I actually am willing to grant that in this case, the fault may be my ability to process the concepts rather than his execution.

In other words, at his best, Ryan writes really fucking well. Laugh out loud well. Dare I suggest David Lynch/Charlie Kaufman well? Could he sustain it for a whole novel? If so, I would buy it. I would buy it for all my friends. And I would tell them "I reviewed his blog."

When you go to this blog, do yourselves a favor and check out the Storyhole and More pages. There are definitely some keepers in there. (Switcheroo, for example.)

Nobody's perfect. So, what could Ryan do better? The template is fine. No changes there. In the writing... I dunno, there were just some times when the density of the words created a short-circuit in my visual processing cortex, which is a good part of the reason why this review was late. Strive for more clarity. Sometimes less is more. Listen to your inner editor.

But by all means, keep doing this.

I am on the fence as far as the rating goes. I abhor hyperbole, and as such am really loathe to award IFLYs, and I admit that the one or two misses made me question whether I could hand out an IFLY in this case, but in the end, I have decided to just let it go and stop agonizing.