An Unashamed Personal Pitch to Encourage You to Write for This Website
What do playing football and writing essays have in common? For most of us, it’s over after high school.
I’ve always felt it was a little odd that boys are encouraged to play football, but as soon as they graduate, they are relegated to playing Madden 2012 or joining a fantasy football league.
Also after graduating from high school, seldom, if ever, are we called on to write essays. That’s not to say that everyone in high school enjoyed writing essays assigned to them; heck, I’m pretty sure not everyone who played football really enjoyed it either, but some did even if they didn’t want their classmates to know. Even though you’re older, wiser, and have life experiences to make your essays more mature and more interesting, no one asks you to roll out a 500-2000 word essay.
“No one” is not completely accurate; I’m asking. Write an essay; send it to me, and I’ll check it over to root out all the spelling, punctuation, and structural errors you may still have in your writing in spite of your best efforts. I give no grades, and I only have one editorial policy: I’ll never let you embarrass yourself.
A newly acquired friend after reading some of the essays on the website, told me not to call them essays...to call them stories. He liked my “stories.” Sorry, newly-acquired-friend, they’re not stories; they’re essays. But I understand your reluctance to get involved with “essays” which you probably dreaded being assigned in high school. You’re grown now. Writing is your choice, not someone else’s.
The essays are now accessible in three different ways: by subjects, by authors, and chronologically. By the way, if you’re interested in fiction, go to “Fiction Content.” If you’re interested in poetry, to to “Poetry Content.”
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Essays Organized by Subjects
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Essays Organized by Authors
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Essays Organized by Chronology
MY ESSAYS
3 Dogs are Chosen: Cats Choose
6 Golf
8 Music
9 Poetry
10 Jokes
11 Mathematics
12 Cars
13 Bars
14 Our Town
18 Farming Bad: Gardening Good
19 The Horse and Other Ways to Die
21 Intelligence
25 What’s All This Israel Stuff?
26 House
27 Food
28 LSU and Other Things I Don’t Lose Sleep Over
30 Shock
32 The PO-lice
34 Clothes
35 Weather
36 Death and Other Humorous Parts of Living
37 End of the World... or Not So Much
38 Gifts
42 Hunting
44 Friends Misplaced But Not Lost
45 Fishing
47 Haircut
48 Vacations
49 Politics
51 Gambling
52 Coffee
56 Holy Moly! We Went to the Moon!
59 Magazines
61 Idioms
62 Reading
63 John Wayne
64 Glossophobia
65 Newspapers
67 Oops!
68 The New Telephone Book’s Here!
69 I Guess I’m Just a Bad Person
70 Sundays, the Sabbath, and Blue Laws
72 The Day I “Met” Robert Penn Warren
73 The Ol’ Double L: a Sovereign Nation
79 Photography
84 Spring Arrives with the Masters
85 Hucklebuckle
86 The Most Interesting Man in the World
87 Funny Folks: Stand-Up Comedians
88 H. L Mencken
91 GTT
93 How Old Art Guy Became an Online Magazine
94 Cattywhompus
96 UFOs and Me
97 Who or Whom?
98 Humility
102 Salt
103 Bathroom: the Horror, the Horror
104 The Upside Down and Backward World of Languages
105 High Self-Esteem and Expectations
106 Dang It, Darwin
107 An Ode to Ripple
108 Janis
112 Old Minds Wander
113 Night to Day: the Transition
115 Listening for the Mockingbirds
116 G. K. Chesterton
117 Bad Luck Bill and Other Superstitions
118 Azalea Pinkwater
119 Hobson’s Choice
121 My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma
122 Work, Work, Work til Your Ass Falls Off
125 Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
126 The Power of Positive Thinking
127 Southern Waving
128 To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
129 Murals
130 Your’re Getting on My Last Nerve: Quotation Marks and Italics
131 The Penny
135 Nancy Said: Quotation Marks
137 Creepy Places
138 An Open Letter
139 Know Thyself
141 Bobby Hebert
143 Old Photos
144 Wilbur Shaw
145 The Art Accident
147 Lord Elgin
150 Language Matters
152 Impossible?
154 Last Meals
155 Alone
157 Cool
159 Zombies
160 Drinking and Camping and the Presidents
161 Coaches
162 A Remarkable “Insignificant” Person
163 Frog or Toad?
167 Harrison Barron
168 Linear Week
169 Maybe Folks Just Don’t Like Art
170 New Years Resolutions or Lies We Tell Ourselves
171 Ugly Cars
172 Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum
174 ...and I Ain’t Too Sure About You
175 Name Change Head Explosion
181 Bigwigs
182 Grandma Barron
183 Irish
184 Round Top
186 Flyover County
187 No Apocalypse: Off to Work
188 Duke Ellington
189 Kiss My Grits
190 If You’re a Man over Thirty
193 I Ain’t No Graduation Speaker
194 Applause, Please
195 The Real Rocky
196 Roll Dem Dice
202 I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Technology
203 I Am a Lucky Man
205 Small Scenes, Big Memories
206 It Was Never Your Team, Les
208 Irish Fathers and Automobiles
209 Bob and Me
212 You’re Still Not the Boss of Me
214 Meaning of Life
217 Movietone News
219 George W. Bush
220 Wanderlust
221 Leon Hale
222 Will Rogers: Renaissance Man
224 The Don Quixote of Donkeys
225 Shoot the Art or the Artist
226 My Tree
228 Bored
229 Philosophy: Yeah, That’s the Ticket
231 Anti-intellectualism My Butt
235 Words
236 An Epiph
237 Fog
238 P. G. Wodehouse
239 Hitchin’
240 Nicknames
242 College Degrees:
243 Amos ‘n’ Andy
245 I Know Nothing
246 Sultry
247 Bret Harte
248 Spoons
249 Saki
250 Afterlife
251 Preacher
254 People
255 Suicide Happens
256 My Pallbearers
257 Not a Wizard
258 Bob Barron
259 The Old Guy Card
260 Bringing Gusto to the Game
262 Trismegistus
264 Different Times---Different Standards
265 Attaboy, 8
267 My Front Porch
268 Hell, It’s On
269 Paul Harvey: American Hero
271 My Reality
272 Uncle Earl
275 The Bevish and Other Ways to Goomberdock
276 Difficult Problem: Difficult Solutions
277 The Mystery of Electricity
278 “So...You Have Six Friends
279 I Hate Trump
280 Don’t Want to Be Too Ambitious
285 We Bought a Car
287 My Old Brain
288 The DQ
291 Happy Pessimist
292 Place
293 Sneezes
294 Hold My Beer
295 Magic
296 Jack
297 My Eulogy, a Work in Progress
298 Routines
299 Hate
300 300
301 Bob and Silent K
302 Mark Twain
303 Tibia Vara
304 Bourre
308 My First and Best Principal
310 Dumb Aliens
311 Stephen Hawkins without the Brain
312 Prayer
314 Scraps of High School Memories
315 It’s My Birthday
317 Lonely Artists
318 Hardware, Software, and Life
320 Apathy---Not Always a Bad Thing
321 I’m a Capitalist
323 I Collect People
325 Snake!
326 Berkeley PC Police Save the World
327 Do Aliens Have a Sense of Humor
328 Beer for All
329 It’s Football Season and Fall Can’t Be Far Behind
331 Magical Thinking
332 No Control
332 Oh, Yeah...and I Had a Heart Attack
334 Not a Chance from the Get-Go
337 Just Not Funny
338 Good Luck, Dems
341 Javelina Yawns
342 Too Dumb to Know
343 Well Done, You Arrogant Bastards
346 Rosie Orozco
348 Uh...Bad News and More Bad News
349 Golf---Oh, Well
350 Mah Jongg
352 Ya’ll So Silly
353 Settling
354 John Grant
355 The American People Have Spoken
357 ET Munoz
358 Rehab
359 Novelty Songs
361 My Friend Grady
362 Late Mention: LSU Wins National Championship
364 I Miss Myself
368 Square Roots
369 Problem Solved
370 Cock Fighting
371 My Friend Jay
372 Buyer’s Regret
373 Blood Simple
374 Coersion Versus Persuasion
377 Cheap Lessons
383 Living to 130
384 Felon Friendly
385 Pumpkin Fraud
386 Manure Shoveler
387 Chiropractors
388 Ex-Students
390 My Friend Joe
392 The World According to John
393 One of My Better Qualities
394 The Insurrection
398 And Gawd Said
399 I Sneered at my Fantasy Analysis
400 The 400
401 Get Use to It
402 Okay, I Said It
403 Less is More
404 Just Minding My Own Business
406 Falling...a Lot
407 What a Country!
409 Barbecue Secrets
411 Birthdays---I’ve Had a Few
414 Liberals and ‘Free Speech’
415 Fantasy Football: Year 100: Part Deux
416 My Show
421 What Do You Say to a Dying Friend?
423 Outhouses
426 Get Smart
428 Billy Bob Speaks on ‘lectric Cars
430 Fantasy Football: Year 100
432 Bobby Joe and Bubba Debrief
433 Cat Naps
434 Methusela
435 Shallow John
437 Rambo
438 Going Home Again
439 Why Essays?
440 The Great Divide
441 I Remember
442 Who Killed JFK?
443 Churches, Work Harder or...
445 Open Letter to the Class of ’60
446 Stanford Retards
447 The Library of Unread Books
448 Bobby Joe and Bubba and Fission and Fusion
450 Get a Rope
451 Onward and Upward to Hospice
453 Insults Are Us
454 Bubba and Bobby Joe Solve a Plethora of Problems
455 A Complaint from a Loyal Texan
456 Talking to Men
457 Weaponization of the Federal Government
460 Colleges: Perceptions and Realities
463 Boom
465 Magic Words
466 Bobby Joe, Bubba, and Dylan Mulvaney
468 Square Pegs and Round Holes
469 I Fell Again
470 Artificial Intelligence and HAL
473 Stick It Where the Sun Don’t Shine
475 Thanks, Mate
476 Bubba and Bobby Joe: Friends
477 Bubba and Bobby Joe and Dylan Mulvaney: the
478 Ball Lightning
479 Arrogance
480 Giant Brains and Camouflage
481 Stuff I Miss
482 Cottonseed
483 Walk It Off
484 The JP Awards
486 Bigfoot
487 Metaphysics
488 TV Today
489 Hospice and Death and Stuff
490 Seychelles
491 Bubba, Bobby Joe, and Waldo
492 Mass Murders
493 Poetry: Odd and Pretenscious
494 Book Burnings and Censorship
495 Lying
496 Not Much Interested in Your Soul
499 Evel Sally
500 500
501 Uncle Sam, You Got a Lot of ‘Splanin’ to Do
502 Your Vote
503 The Kiwi Man
504 Deranged
505 You’re a Jet
506 Eddie Faust
507 Kryptonite
508 Laugh Damn It
510 The Wonderfulness of the Moment
511 Past Lives
514 Never Give Up
515 Vigilance
