Parts of this read like the early internal monologue sections of Cryptonomicon. Terrible or not, it's distinctive.

> This is terrible writing, and if you can't tell, there is something deeply wrong.

This is subjective. Countless times in the history of human literature a piece of writing has been called garbage -- or at least, flawed -- by some authority, only to later become lauded as a great piece of writing. So not being able to tell (or in this case, to match your own taste) is simply par for the course.

Remember all that's been written about Shakespeare's Hamlet and his use of mixed metaphors, "[...] or to take arms against a sea of troubles [...]". What? How do you take arms against the sea? And why was it before "slings and arrows", what does that have to do with the sea? Mixed metaphors are a sin, etc, etc.