LUDIC LOG

Hello! Thanks for visiting my site.

Longtime readers -- of which, I can only assume, there are millions -- will no doubt think this brief introduction to the man behind the Ludic Log superfluous, even pointless. But the fact is, there are, as far as I know, literally tens of thousands of new readers to this site who may be wondering: whose the hand, whose the eye, whose the fearful symmetry behind the third-most-popular site on the internet (according to the Bostonian Fantast Invented Statistics Bureau)? Well, it's time for a refresher course.

My name is Leonard Allen Pierce Jr. I am the seventeenth person in my distinguished family to be named Leonard Pierce -- or, to be precise, the third. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, a city where the mere mention of my name is probably more valuable than the beads which I seem to recall act as the local currency; I left there in 1986, 1991, or sometime between 1992 and 1999 to move to my current home of Chicago, Illinois. Chicago, which has been objectively established by the Objective Establishment Office of the Freedonian government to be the greatest city in America, has benefitted enormously from my presence here; while I have not had the time to do the actual research necessary to establish this, I think it is safe to assume that its shrinking crime rate, economic prosperity and stability of growth can be traced directly to me. In fact, it is no exaggeration, or at least not one that I think we should discourage, to say that Chicago owes its status as a world-class city to the fact that I live here. In the same way, I can say in hopes of not being contradicted that Detroit owes its steady decline and poor national reputation to the fact that I have never lived there, and while such harsh truths are never easy to deliver, it must be said that they have no one to blame but themselves for this.

I am 33 years old -- the exact same age as Jesus was when he died. Unlike Jesus, however, I have no plans to depart this sphere at said age, because my work here is not yet done. Jesus failed to accomplish a number of his goals (world peace, the salvation of mankind, the establishment of a temporal communitarian utopia); I do not intend to give up so easily. In light of this, I think it's fair to say that I am better than Jesus by any measurable standard. However, I don't intend to rest on my laurels! Just because I'm in my early 30s and have decided that I am one of the greatest minds of this or any other century, I have no intention on coasting on the many accomplishments that I rightly or wrongly claim for myself. In fact, I am more dedicated to achievement now than ever, and today is my birthday! (Before the pedants among you start writing angry notes, no, today is not actually the day I was born. But I have found that people treat you charitably, say nice things about you and buy you food and gifts if you tell them it's your birthday, and I consider this an absolute good, at least for me. Please mark your calendars "Leonard Pierce's birthday -- observed". Also mark this on your calendars every third Friday, and every Wednesday in March, June and November.)

My ethnic origins are half Irish, half Arab, and half whatever ethnos I feel like co-opting at the time to win arguments. I am six feet, two inches tall, but I like to tell people I'm taller so they will be afraid of me. I am very fat, but some cultures I just made up find this a mark of great beauty. Not that I need any help; my physical appearance has been described, by me, just now, as "angelic", "rapturous", "breath-taking", "stunning" and "the outward embodiment of melting, helpless raw sexual magnetism". I am able to pick up heavy objects and thus can only assume that I am the strongest man in the midwestern United States. Although I am a high school dropout, I believe I can say with only the minimum amount of hyperbole necessary to seem impressive that my autodidactic endeavors have educated me to roughly the level of a very smart man with five doctoral degrees from Harvard.

When asked what I do, I always say "do you mean, what is my occupation, or what do I do to make money"? It's usually annoying when people say this, but when I do it, it's funny. What I do for money varies: sometimes I work a tedious low-level office job; sometimes I pretend I am a millionaire aristocrat or a beloved enterpreneur while I am working a tedious low-level office job. But what I really am is a writer. I say this because I am writing these words now, and thus, by fulfilling the technical limitations of the word 'writer', I think I am justified in doing so. But, beyond that, I am a published author; beyond having actually been published in over a dozen publications that really exist or did at one point, I have also, in my imagination, been published in hundreds more, including some of America's most prestigious literary and arts magazines. To those who denigrate this activity as "lying", I ask only: is not imagination a writer's most valuable tool? And to those who characterize my claim to have written three critically acclaimed best-selling novels and the screenplay to an Oscar-nominated film as "dreaming", I say this: dreaming is what writers do. We are the dreamers of the world. And if the success of one's dream can be measured by the distance between it and reality (and I think it can), then I must humbly say that I am the greatest writer in the history of the world.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy the Ludic Log.