I would like to give you an example of how I am a deceptive writer. I do not intentionally set out to deceive you—never!—but by one grand omission, I have deceived you. I have been detailing my difficulties with painting recently, with not knowing what to paint, with having no ideas, et cetera, it is my dog-eared book, my weary tune. You will not, of course, know this, because you do not read “Untitled," but I am telling you anyway, as though you were a loyal, daily reader, and I do this because that is what I do, I write words for no one to read. But this is the practice, not that, so there is nothing amiss here, all is as it should be. And yet, my deception of omission, I am confessing it this morning—! (The mind runs out in front of itself to see what lies ahead, what the landscape is and to see if there is danger there, and then the mind returns to report on the dangers it has seen—and it has seen some! It has seen significant potential danger! I do not think, after all, that I can—…let’s get this out of its parentheses, it is more than just parenthetical, what I now must say, it has become, unexpectedly, this paragraph’s very thesis, I shall not nail it to some hidden-staircase door, but to the main door)—there, we are out of our parentheses, they are so confining! After all, I cannot tell you what this omission is, for I have just seen the danger in doing so, and I am too superstitious to tempt fate with words that always, in the right—rather, wrong—combination, always hex the thing they signify if what they signify is not yet ready to be revealed. It is that simple. It is like young fern underfoot, words will crush the tender not-yet-ready things. I am sorry I told you I would do something that I did not then do. It is an example of how I am sometimes a deceptive writer.