If you read enough corporate press releases, grant proposals, legislation, municipal reports or, in my case, unedited corporate or government opinion essays, you sometimes discover writing that is so dull, tangled and incomprehensible that you realize you are kind of in the presence of genius.

Here at the Courier-Post, we have discovered a prodigy for this — a Dr. Brian Pseudonym, who has freelanced for various corporations and government agencies, sending opinion pieces that were so utterly painful for us to read that they've even irritated people who were merely standing next to us.

We first got a hint of the man's talents from his essay about ... well, who knows? Let's just say property taxes. One of the editors with whom I work got through two sentences before he hit this:

"The development body allows extensions and exemptions for some criteria, and that will be considered, though eligibility criteria still are being determined."

The editor keeled over at his desk, his head landing in a lukewarm puddle of orange soda. A few days later, I myself experienced "The Pseudonym Effect" when I got halfway through a piece about — economic development in Pennsauken, maybe? I have no distinct memories after that until I awoke two weeks later near Exit 7 of the Turnpike somehow driving a cement truck.

Then one day while reading one of Pseudonym's pieces (shortly before I blacked out and awoke two days later in a gym class at my old high school), I realized he had written a love story.

According to Pseudonym, he was hanging around a lowdown dive in south Philadelphia one night, reading the fine print on the establishment's zoning permit, when ... Carmen walked in. "Her eyes," he wrote, "were like fluid optical apparatus of an apparently organic nature. I stated to her, `I wish to propose to submit to your consideration to discuss an agenda on the following action items...'"

But the electricity between them was so powerful that further talk (fortunately) was unnecessary. It even inspired him to write poetry:

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 1. (a) I love thee according to Section A, subclause 12 of the Uniform Code of Compliance, though not according to subclause 14 (d), since that was amended to provide for exemptions under the Harris Act..."

And so forth — 15 sections with 41 subsections, in a legally air-tight cry of love. The lovers soon ran away for a tryst on the shores of Baja California, where Pseudonym's diary entries were particularly scorching:

"After surveying the area, we conjoined on mutual assignation within the temporary residential site, where we then retired to executive session for approximately 30 minutes, the results being so satisfying that we could not keep from going into executive session again at least twice before room service arrived."

But back home, as soon as they were comfortable enough around each other to chat casually, things went sour:

"The recording secretary, hereinafter referred to as `I,' was outlining the process by which municipal contracts are put to bid, when the counterpart, hereinafter referred to as `she,' adopted facial characteristics of pejorative dissonance, hereinafter referred to as `horror,' and inquired, `Could … could you repeat any of that?'"

By the end of the week, the love of Pseudonym's life had moved to another country, leaving no forwarding address. Pseudonym was heartbroken, as he noted that, "By the way, municipalities that put contracts out to bid must comply with administrative as well as statutory directives."

You have to have read a lot of Pseudonym to see that, somewhere between the lines, the light had died.

He barely sends us anything anymore. Just about all that remains of Pseudonym is his former spirit, like a distant flame (or an influence not defined as intellectual property per se and therefore qualifying as "fair use" under the Uniform Code). And no other writer since has been so dry, so bureaucratic or so self-important.

But a lot of them, believe me, come close