Run-on, little sentence, run on

 

I have recently rediscovered my fondness for the run-on sentence, it is something that I’ve neglected for many years now, years that were, truth be told, in rather dire need of the occasional run-on sentence, a situation forcing me think how very odd that I, personally, have neglected the lowly run-on with such reckless abandon, especially in light of living in a world in which everything is done in very short bursts, be it words or actions or even thoughts, all of which would benefit from the thoughtfulness and consideration contained in a good run-on, although I’m not sure the world is necessarily ready to receive the run-on back into its impatient bosom despite that it could do with a little slowing down, something which is certainly achieved when picking one’s way through an endless and, some might say, tedious, long-winded commentary about nothing much at all, although there is nothing that says the run-on sentence absolutely has to be about nothing much at all, it can, in fact, contain something or even vast quantities of something, whatever the run-on sentence writer wants, really, it is completely open, that is the thing about run-ons, they are open to almost anything, very much open, if you think about it, because you have line after line after line after line (ad nauseam) to say your piece, there’s no period to bring your ponderous thoughts to a sudden and sometimes brutal end, there are no paragraphs to create the modern and supposedly desirable ‘white space’ sought by so many yet achieved only at a high risk of being just a bit too white, a little too short, thereby not allowing for the full flowering of clarity, something the run-on sturdily and relentlessly strives to provide, yes, plenty of clarity, one could say buckets of clarity, or, if not clarity, at least lots of damn words, some of which might be small while others might be quite large, one could even conceivably throw a ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ into a run-on sentence without any obvious downside other than perhaps the struggle by some to pronounce the word, since the run-on, busy running on as it is, does not allow much for pauses to allow a closer focus on any one individual word, which is a shame because by not allowing pauses one could argue that the run-on achieves little more than a meaningless ramble much like the half-thought short-burst except that the run-on is more of a exhausting-to-point-of-death endless meaningless ramble while the other is more of a snippy meaningless ramblette, yet putting this aside just for a moment, the hardest part of the run-on sentence is knowing when or where or even how to bring the wretched thing to an end, as it can too easily run away with itself,  and often does, to the bemusement of many, becoming harder to catch than a clam at high tide, not that a clam needs to be ‘caught’ so much as ‘picked up as it lays there doing nothing whatsoever to save itself’, which is, as you may or may not know, the thing about clams, they might take advantage of high tides to conceal themselves but they are totally clueless about actually escaping, as is the author of the run-on, for how does one stop once one has gone deep into it, one almost needs a gun to shoot a period at the sentence in hopes that it lands squarely right about here.