I dreamed again about a coordinating conjunction.  It said the clauses in our sentence were long and contained internal punctuation used to separate long items in a series.  This was what I wanted to hear: it meant that I belonged in the sentence.  But for some reason I felt certain that the conjunction was lying.

I also dreamed that I had dinner and drinks with Michael Tomasky, who said: "If I were linguistic emperor, not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I’m on some sort of drug.  What writing today does that?  Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”