I've answered my own questions. Found info in topics that didn't really relate to mine but something tripped my brain into understanding what was going on. It's the damn commas that are screwing it up. That's the last thing I would have thought, that's how sharp I am. I saw trying sed to attempt to color logs and that lead me to think of just stripping the commas and that works well enough for me. I just used:
clog -f system.log | sed y/,// | ccze
Sorry if this was too elementary[it's actually surprising to me that I figured it out. Yes, it seems I'm talking to myself. Is that a problem? No, not unless you start having a dialogue. Oh, OK.]