Bringing Up Shandy

There’s a treble-volumed pikestaff—sitting bleary at my laptop, I said—There’s a … pikestaff, and Johnston, if truth is what you’re betting for, will remember—but there’s a point, for what is memory but a mangle of mis-stitches and invented patterns on the throw of life!—Johnston, scorecard pictured, biro poised, will remember the trails (less beaten, the better) and corner-bushels of that higglety-pigglety Garden of a work, no doubt, all the clearer, for the fresh acreage of Time, between that moment when it is her folly to undertake—out of necessity, or dearth of copper—the reckoning-up of such garbled finicking as I am lucky to emit, and the moment when, yet unencumbered by the broken coils and weave of matted scales which it is any Scholar’s fate at one never-expected point—and let us not mis-take, by which hopscotcher word I mean take awry, the expression—to have dumped, without ado, on her head, Johnston, never-expecting as she was—if I may say this (Chancellor, Principal) without aiming the remark ill, and hitting, square, as it were, in the side, those pious among us who vet rather the gestures of a tongue, than a fist—in what it is handy to entitle her Prelapsarian condition, first had dumped on a head (no ado, & I’m sure) then buoyant with teacherly lauds, that which it is all scholars’ fate, &c.; whereas in my (to remint the coin) pre-Shandean nonage, I was, through my youth-long, and unsalutary, immersion in the mudbath answers to Culture (querulously, querulously wailed, on behalf of poets—(born not MFA’d) for they are too busy with versifying—by their shoeless agents) in our Sceptred Jail, today, shall we propose, under-equipped and certes unprepared—but I see, in default of foresight, to my small regret, these phrases want diverse complements (the one there, being not, I believe, identical, if similar to in brevity as well as in sense, the other), in the way of preposition, so must reboot—by upbringing impoverished as the gambler’s kin, and by a near-sighted husbandry, perhaps, mal-equipped, in parts as in mind, swiftly to swallow so giant, so lofty, so all-things-comprehending, but tinily perfect, too, so burgundy wondrous a curtain of tragedy’s stage, as that oblong resource of neverless pith, to whose Noun pertains the attribute Shandean, such that I, shiftless blatherskite whom I am—no thoughts I can put a botched signature to but those which stutter, I lust, I hope, I sting, I retire, I bury—last infinitely better than I know it, can copy its force.