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Muck BookMay 04, 2006 If jobs are pains, then my last one was chronic and the one I just finished was acute. The chronic one went on forever, I thought it would never end; I wanted to smother it under a pillow or drown it in a mud puddle. The one just finished showed up a week ago Monday. It was only in residence for 10 days, and for one of those days I was elsewhere; it was less than a third the length of the Interminable One. But shorter is not necessarily sweeter: this was like driving cross-country with someone you loathe, and your dear but congenitally polite Aunt Patience is riding in the back seat so you can't even torment the Loathesome One with clever but undeniably nasty barbs. Silk purses, they say, can't be made out of sows' ears, but that misses the point, Sows' ears may be homely, but they serve the sow well, and the sow wouldn't be too happy if you commandeered her ear for a purse. Copyediting the Loathesome One was like spreading mocha butter-cream frosting on the manure pile: it doesn't make the manure pile edible; it's just a waste of good frosting. How to put it? This manuscript could be used as a case study in how fuzzy language is often fuzzily related to fuzzy thinking. As a copyeditor, I'm supposed to tease the meaning out of tangled sentences. I teased and I teased, for 320 pages I teased, and I'm here to tell you: there were only 10 pages of meaning in the entire manuscript. If I could have reduced it to 10 physical pages, my Express Mail bill would have been cheaper, but I would have paid anything to have it gone. And now gone it is. Except for the endnotes and the foreword. They're going tomorrow. I made the 4:00 p.m. Express Mail deadline with 15 minutes to spare, then Rhodry and I headed off to the barn. The sun was out; it was the first short-sleeve T-shirt day of spring. Shortly after we got there, Rhodry disappeared with his friend Tanner; they came back more than an hour later, soaking wet and smelling swampy. I mucked out two stalls, picked out four paddocks, and made up grain, then I got in my first ride since Saturday -- a good one. Amazing how when it comes to manure the real thing is cleaner than the manuscript kind.
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