So it begins...

Atrocious.

It's a fantastic word. It sounds like an enormous rock chucked into a murky pond. KER-PLOOSH-glorsh.

You just don't see this word enough, outside of stuffy old Masterpiece Theatre parlor dramas where its power is lost among the haughty blah-blah-blah.

The English language is a gorgeous beast—musical, evocative and fun to play with but likely to take your fingers off if you rub it the wrong way.

In high school I was trained to write massive sentences that didn't so much flow as flood. We're talking William Faulkner jumbos stacked with participial phrases and garnished with appositives. Things of beauty.

In college, that writing style drew praise from some and derision from others. My favorite incident involved a grumpy literary criticism professor known for scribbling angry red diatribes on students' papers. Unable to find anything wrong with my arguments on Wuthering Heights, he'd punctuated my paper with a single snide remark:

"You have atrocious gramma."

As this was written to the edge of the page, I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he'd scrawled the absent "r" on his desk and that he wasn't insulting my grandmother.

For years, I've had that sentence up on my mantle next to some of my all-time favorites. It even has a similar cadence to the ultimate catchphrase: "He say you brade runna."

Who the hell am I? In a nutshell, I'm a graphic designer who's sitting around waiting to become the next Terry Pratchett. I was going to call this blog One Man Bland, but some cunning individual beat me to the name. However, that forced me to think beyond the pun, stirring that professor's comment up from the silt in my brain. The name says it all.

So my goal with this blog is—what am I saying?! I was an English major; I have no goals. What I plan to do is dress this blog up in several shades of nonsense involving graphic design, writing and pop-culture, layering it all in a nice, eye-watering plaid.

So stick around for crullers. You might be entertained, and maybe--just maybe--you'll learn something about yourself (most likely that you're sick of reading pithy blogs).

-Randy