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I signed on very early this morning to discover a submission in my editing inbox. The manuscript was a total of 2 words (for which a payment of $.07 was enclosed), and it came with a query: “Can you improve this.”

You may have guessed that the two words were: “Jesus wept.”

This is actually a famous literary trope, the assertion that the simple declarative sentence, “Jesus wept,” is one of the greatest bits of prose/poetry in the English language.

Unfortunately, it was not submitted by the author, but by one Gene Weingarten, who is the type of wiseass who, instead of calling me up to discuss this little bit of business, would, at roughly 6 a.m. when it occurred to him, go to my website, go through the whole story calculator process, pull out the credit card, and actually submit it.

No doubt he loved the idea that the total cost was 7 cents.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the essence of what Gene does. It’s a kind of performance humor, all cheeky silliness at first glance, but with a profound aftertaste.

Why is “Jesus wept” so great? Well you can find a treatise on that subject at Wikipedia.

But basically, when you can say, and imply, a tremendous amount in a very few words, it is always powerful. This is an almost perfect distilation of that phenomenon. Dealing strictly on a literary plane, there may be no more potent a figure than Jesus — both human and divine, doomed to death but destined for ressurection, a symbol of our greatest failings (as demonstrated by his persecution and crucifixion) and our only chance for salvation.  And as any hack writer knows, “wept” is the go-to verb when you need to juice up the emotions fast.  Put them together, and you have a nuclear explosion of meaning. Weeping is a very mortal act, uniquely human. It speaks of Jesus as a man, who can suffer in a very bodily way, pre-figuring his coming torment on the cross. If Jesus could not feel pain, his sacrifice would be meaningless. If he could not doubt, his faith would be unnecessary. The more Jesus is like the rest of us, the more power there is in his story.

So the accompanying memo with this two-word submission, a mere four words itself — “Can you improve this?” — is itself a kind of poetry. Good writing isn’t about words, it’s about meaning, and very often, the fewer words the better.

I was e-mailing a friend and a client about possible additional complications he could heap upon the hapless protagonist in his novel, and I was telling him about the time a vet charged me $150 to diagnose my dog as having a ligament tear that would require $5000 surgery followed by a three-month confinement in a crate. I ignored the diagnosis, and the dog got better on her own — something the vet had said was impossible. But that’s not the point I’m making here. The astounding thing is: seconds after I sent that e-mail, I looked to the right side of the screen in my Gmail inbox, and it was filled with ads for dog walkers, pet sitters, a veterinary instruments.

April isn’t the cruelest month. October is. The more intensely beautiful it becomes, the closer that beauty is to obliteration. On those precious few days when the sky is blue and the fall colors at a peak, the knowledge that the next windy day will blow it to hell almost makes you weep. Who needs to be reminded so vividly that nothing good can last?

On the other hand, it sure is pretty.

I have had a vision of the future: We all work for ourselves, answerable to no one but Google.

I came by this view after I took the buyout at The Post, where I had been editor of The Washington Post Magazine (before it became the WP magazine). But as much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t afford to retire in the sense of pursuing shuffleboard and living in pajamas. (Turned out, I could only afford the pajamas part.)

I wasn’t going to starve, but I did need some supplemental income. Originally, I had imagined that I’d pick up some new work in journalism. But despite 30 years as a newspaper writer and editor, I soon was forced to conclude that finding another newspaper job would be as likely as finding work as a stagecoach driver. Sure, there were still a few Wild West tourist traps operating, but they were downsizing to pony rides, and, in any case, none ever responded to e-mails bearing my resume.

So after a lifetime of resisting it — God, how I hate to gamble — I went all entrepreneurial on myself. I hired a guy named Steve to build a website for me, hung up an electronic, web-searchable shingle as an editor for hire and began publishing my own blog. My idea was that the thousands of people who had inundated me with manuscripts over the years may want something more from an editor than a terse rejection notice. What if they could stop that guy whose signature spelled doom in mid stroke, get him to spend some time with their writing, to tell them what they’d done wrong and how to improve?

Maybe I had the kernel of a business plan. But making it into an actual business would require an education. First I had to figure out how to buy and register a domain name for my website. I still haven’t figured out how someplace called godaddy.com has managed to acquire ownership of every site name in the universe, even those that nobody has thought of yet. But so be it. At least coming up with possible names for my editing/blogging site proved easy. I spewed dozens: writeaway.com; writenow.com, thewritestuff.com — every pun and cliché in the book. And discovered: all of them were taken.

My friend Gene Weingarten suggested tomthebutcher.com, which was both catchy and apparently available, but possibly didn’t deliver the exact message I was looking for. Whenever Gene had branded me with that name in his Post columns and chats, I told people, “I prefer Tom the Surgeon.” Which is probably why I woke up in the middle of the night and fired up my computer to type “storysurgeons” into godaddy’s search engine. Bingo. With a little application of plastic I had a website name storysurgeons.com. Five minutes later, I got an email from Google (privy to every random thought that goes through my keyboard) offering me a $100 coupon for advertising my site online. I filled out a form, and now I had an ad campaign too.

So for the cost of a week-long vacation, I had an online business and my own publishing concern. In the days that followed, I very easily slipped into writing and working the same hours I had in my Post job, except for two minor differences. One, nobody was paying me; and two, if I wanted to get up in the middle of the afternoon and take my dog for a walk in the woods, I could, and would. I found that to be a fair trade-off.

On a recent afternoon of the sort that has given fall a good name despite the fact that it is a harbinger of three months of black ice, I was stepping through a light-dappled forest, the emerging reds and golds exploding in the angled sun. A cool breeze rustled a million leaves, and I could barely hear the hum of work-day traffic beginning to build behind me. Something came over me, and I felt the urge to shout. So I did, tentatively at first, and then louder until I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “FREEDOM!” over and over like Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

Then I remembered: in the very next frames of film, Gibson has his guts slowly spooled out of his body by the executioner.

But, damn, this sense of liberation feels good. While it lasts.

Story Surgeons on Achenblog.

Dan Snyder issues panicked report: Jim Zorn seen climbing into basket of runaway balloon.

For more inane twittering, see @tomshroder at twitter.com.

Today, as I was dealing with the fact that Weingarten is trying to write a humor column about  several people he knows who have died recently, suddenly and tragically (yes, I did say a HUMOR column), I read this in the New York Times. It’s funny how irritating it is to hear 40-year-olds whining about confronting  their mortality when you’re 55. But aside from that bias, is there really anything irritating about this Judith Warner column?  Yes, I think. There’s a certain smugness throughout, perhaps most acutely in the following phrase:

It’s just that urgency that goes, in early middle age. All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction . . .

That blows the irritation fog horn. Primarily for blindly assuming that reaching middle age automatically comes with “a steady pulse of pleasure” — ignoring the obvious truth that her steady pulse has more to do with being an upper middle class professional with a whole lot of luck on her side than attaining the age of 40.

Anyone doing first-person writing has to be very careful about explicitly generalizing his or her own experience to everyone else, especially when wallowing in personal good fortune. Then to compound that error by COMPLAINING about one’s good fortune, as Warner does here, is really hard to forgive.

I always dreamed of this as a child, but the reality turned into a nightmare: http://tinyurl.com/yjgpvhr

I have it on good authority (ok, Dave Barry) that there are 100,000 pythons loose in the Fla. Everglades. I’m canceling my rafting trip.

For more inspirational 140-character pearls of whatever, search @tomshroder on Twitter.com.

Great writing in the review of Dylan’s Christmas Album in the Post yesterday. You knew it was going to be fun when it began: “This Christmas season, parents will introduce their children to a legendary sage from northern climes renowned for his unsettling facial hair and unmistakable voice. This man is, of course, Bob Dylan.” They say that genius is finding real connections between seemingly unlike objects, and if there is anything more unlike than Bob and Santa, well, have at it. And you know what? “They” have a point. To a physicist and an artist, we really are all One, and making others see that as clearly always makes for good work.

But what makes this particular piece so wonderful is Chris Richards’ barely supressed ecstasy over the bizarro collision of the unstoppable force of Dylan’s steely-eyed, pierce-the-world-to-the-heart negativity and the immovable object of manufactured Christmas cheer. How about this for a thesis paragraph?

“The man’s serrated croon isn’t just jarring — it actually gives these chirpy old chestnuts a sense of menace.

And it is awesome.”

Later on, Richards observes that Dylan manages to make “Here Comes Santa Clause (Down Santa Claus Lane)” sound like a threat.

Now, that’s my kind of holiday record.

(For another fab take on Christmas, try Hank Steuver’s “Tinsel: A search for America’s Christmas Present.” More on that soon).

Continuing my series on writers I knew way back when and have embarrassing pictures of, today I’ll focus on Joel Achenbach, and the secrets of writing humor.

I first met Joel when I moved to Miami to work as associate editor at the Miami Herald’s Tropic Magazine. Gene Weingarten , the editor (believe it or not) who hired me, suggested that if I needed a place to live, there was this very bright young writer at the paper who was looking for someone to share a house in Coconut Grove.

The house, on a palm-lined street just a block off the very funky main drag, was perfect, and so was the rent. But Joel hesitated. “You sure an old dude like you really can handle living with a young buck like myself?” he asked.

I was all of 30. Joel was 24.

I admit there may have been an initial maturity differential. My reaction, when I first stepped into the shared bathroom and noticed that the black bathtub was actually made of white porcelain, was to buy a can of Comet and a scouring pad to scrub it white (or at least gray) again. Joel considered this an act of aggression, a violation of his personal code, and made it clear that no more grownup-type behavior would be tolerated. So I rapidly regressed, and the house devolved into a college dorm, with random friends decamping on the living room couch, violent wiffle ball games in the front hall at all hours and parties so loud that they shook the glass storefront of the 7-11 two blocks away — where I had gone at 2 a.m. for more beer.

We got along fine.

And I soon realized that his horror at a clean tub was 90 percent schtick. (The 10 percent consisting of genuine horror is a blog for another day).  This was the inception of what would become a continuing commentary on the boy-man lifestyle, which he would raise to art in a series of columns he wrote about what he called “the Loser Patrol” and much later, all his discussion of man-caves and “porch season” in his inimitable “Achenblog” on the Post website.

Consider this recent Achenblog posting:

Two Guys With Much in Common

It occurs to me that Barack Obama and I have a lot in common. We’re both 48. We both live in Washington, D.C. We both have school-age daughters. And we both have lots of things to worry about.

Like, I need to get the firepit ready for the winter season. I need to chop some wood. I need to get the bikes tuned up. I need to wash my car. I probably need to do some “work” at my “job,” but obviously that’s in the Optional category. I need a haircut.

So already you see it’s a full plate by any measure, bordering on the undoable. But a man must have strength. Shoulder the burden, keep marching ahead. Gut-check time.

Obama, meanwhile, has to focus on Afghanistan, where our troops are facing increasingly deadly attacks even as we prop up an obviously corrupt government. He has to do something about Iran, which is trying to go nuclear. He has to deal with Iraq, which could descend into chaos again as the troops withdraw. He has North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and various other dyspeptic regimes led by dictators doing whatever they can to resemble lunatics. He has to figure out how to save the planet from global warming. He has to guide a health-care bill into law through a gauntlet of conservative fury and liberal dissatisfaction. He must run a government that is, let’s see, about $11 trillion in debt, give or take a trillion. He has to worry about an economy in which the unemployment rate is 9.8 percent. Plus, he has to be concerned about all the secret stuff that the scary briefers tell him every morning, like wire intercepts suggesting that the bad guys are developing airborne pathogens that can give everyone the hiccups (hypothetical — do not panic).

So, you see, there’s just a lot we have in common.

Wait, did I mention the weeding I need to do? The mere thought of it nearly crushes my spirit. This is why I need staffers!

There are so many sophisticated humor strategies going on here it would take pages to deconstruct them all. (WARNING: It’s never pretty to attempt to dissect humor. But it can be helpful if you are trying to be funny in writing to observe a master at work.)

Here we go: Everyone loves to see a clown take a pratfall, as Joel is doing here, pretending to equate his petty slacker concerns with the concerns of the Leader of the Free World. Putting  ‘my “work”‘ and ‘my “job”‘ in quotation marks, and sandwiching that “optional” concern between washing his car and getting a haircut. Asserting that all his inane chores are “bordering on the undoable.”

But there’s more going on here than self-deprecation. As in all of the finest humor, the engine  is keen observation of an obscured truth. And that is, beneath all the weightiness of our formal functions in society, for most of us at least, the small, private world of back yards and fire pits looms large, even in comparison to the serious work of the world.

And then there’s the observed truth of his summary of the world situation — which has a great double whammy of at first sounding like pure hyperbole, until you think about it and realize it’s a little too close to being accurate. My favorite example of this: “He has North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and various other dyspeptic regimes led by dictators doing whatever they can to resemble lunatics.”

And finally, there’s Joel’s ability to accomplish two things at once. By necessity of compression, any sentence in good writing has to serve more than a single purpose. In the following example, Joel both manages to raise his already absurd argument to an even higher plane of absurdity and bring the comparison of his life to Obama’s full circle. Right after completing the summary of the President’s multiple headaches, ending with the fear of biological warfare, he comes back to his own concerns, and as if he’s made the case that they are the equal of Obama’s, he jumps to the next illogical conclusion, which reinforces his buffoonish sense of entitlement:

Wait, did I mention the weeding I need to do? The mere thought of it nearly crushes my spirit. This is why I need staffers!

If someone can write that well, I say give him a pass for a dirty bathtub.