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            There’s a certain panting quality to my narratives, as if I’m running home between occurrences to record the tale. Which I am. As the plot unfurls, so go I. “Life as literature” sounds hopelessly pedantic. “Fucking up and writing about it” is more my style.

            A journalism major at Moosegrave College in 1968, I had a weekly column in the campus newspaper Moose Call. Entitled “Luckless Cream Cheese,” I wrote about poor Mike Hargrove and the terrible (“Sob, sob…”) time he was having with mean girlfriends, campus rivals and his disappointment with American politics.

            Hmmm.

            Why does this sound vaguely familiar?

            To round out the donut, I wanted to spend my penultimate year in college writing (9 months x four weeks =) 36 columns, and end up with a 36 chapter novel. Easy as writer’s cramp.

            My narrative style did not sit well with my college-age editors. “We don’t understand your column,” they complained. “Write essays.”

            “Are people reading my column?”

            “That’s beside the point—“

            “But do people read it?” I asked.

            At this point, Big Kahuna Editor-In-Chief Randall Blake himself intervened in our little office debate. “Everybody reads your fucking column,” he explained, “which is wholly irrelevant. We don’t understand it! Get me, young’un? We don’t get it and we don’t like it.

            “You should write political essays like Kowa Bonga. Write sociological essays like Stephanie Pratt. Do a goddam gardening column, for all I care. Just write something that belongs in a newspaper!

            “We’re a newspaper! Your column reads like chapters in a novel,” he howled, deeply offended.

            “Kowa’s one of my best friends,” I told them, “but he already provides you with Black Power credibility. Steph’ and I sit next to each other in three different classes, but personally, her columns bore me. I hate gardening! Although I do have a good tip: Intersperse mint plants among your marijuana seedlings and you will grow naturally mentholated pot.”

            “Are you going to write essays?” the three editors asked in unison with the finality of an axe chopping wood.

            “No.”

            They discontinued my column.

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            This is the gunfight at O.K. Corral! Okay, Randall, it’s 43 years later. God knows where you are and what you’re doing, but I fully intend to write a sufficient number of intriguing blogs to constitute a book’s worth. Fictionalizing my endless screw-ups, I will re-edit my material, heightening the tension, beefing up the language, turning up the emotional volume.

            If Barack Obama and Sarah Palin can write books, anybody can! Reading Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life, it’s like getting cornered at a cocktail party by a babbling brook who insists on telling her life story. Every five sentences, Sarah makes some little dig at liberals, Democrats or her personal adversaries. Acid barbs sprinkled in mindless chatter, I got my copy, used, from the library for $1. Unfortunately, it stank so much of cigarette smoke, I finally had to throw it in the recycling container. You couldn’t give it away.

            This is my manifesto: If I am successful, I shall crank out a novel as portentous as Norman Mailer, ribald as Henry Miller, spooky as Anne Rice, didactic as Kowa Bonga and boring as Stephanie Pratt.

            (I went on to a military career. Stephanie, bless her, published her first short story collection a year after graduating from Moosegrave. My dear old friend has just published her sixth short story collection! Way t’go, sweetie! A “serious, established author,” her stories still bore me to tears.)

            On your mark, get set… Wish me luck.

            Publisher inquiries welcome!

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