Mike Check

And now, because it's a Sunday morning, an analysis of the ballsiest, most self-indulgent run-on sentence in history. It comes compliments of celebrated author Michael Chabon, from his column in the January/February issue of Details, and via a personal story.

When I was a kid, my grandfather decided one day that, after nearly a lifetime together, he wanted to teach my grandmother how to drive. He pulled over into the parking lot of a shopping center (one which could claim as its anchor a Sears that he happened to have a bizarrre personal vendetta against because it had once sold him a faulty air conditioner, but that's another story) and told my grandmother to switch places with him and take the wheel. She reluctantly acquiesced, sliding into the driver's seat while my grandfather, holding my five-year-old body in his arms, planted himself directly opposite her. For whatever reason, probably old-man recalcitrance, he didn't bother strapping a seatbelt across the two of us. When my grandmother stepped on the gas, the car lunged forward, pushing my grandfather and me back in our seat. Scared to death by the sudden movement, my grandmother immediately stepped on the brakes, throwing us all forward inside the car. This violent stopping and starting seemed to happen at an almost machine-gun rate -- over and over; forward, stop, forward, stop -- until my grandmother finally jammed the brake pedal all the way to the floor -- wrenching me out of my grandfather's arms and slamming my head into the windshield. The impact left an ugly spiderweb across the glass and blood pouring from a gash in my head.

Why do I bring this up?

Just read this, and pay attention to the commas:

"And yet when I heard this gifted and intelligent woman, Annie Druyan, wondering, fervently but not without a sense of her own goofiness, if perhaps, ages hence, some techno-magical future alien race might not be able to reconstitute, from the record of her brain waves, the feeling of her incipient passion for her man and for the work that they undertook together, as equals, partners, and lovers, to re-create the sense of how it felt to be Annie Druyan on an afternoon in New York City during those infatuated, boundary-breaking, termination-shock-crossing years, I knew that I was listening, carried as by a lonely probe across the distances, to the voice of the 1970s."

If you'll excuse me now, I'm going to go wipe the blood off my forehead.