Poems

"I remember the first poem I ever read. I was maybe six or seven, possibly twelve or thirty-two, sometimes numbers blur together in my head.

It started out something like, 'I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree.' Well, needless to say, that turned me off to poetry right away. I have enough nasty thoughts a-tumblin' round in my head without opening my mind to the possibility of sexual congress with a tree. I'm not sure what kind of liberal hoo-hah forced my teachers to include the perverse interest in forestry among my poetic education, but I wanted no part of it.

It was only later, in my college career, that I had a differing point of view put to me. I stopped my English teacher, Gadfly Harpskull, in the hallway and told him I was going to drop out of his class if he kept reading poetry to us, I wanted no part of it. He demanded I explain my disdain for poetry. I did, and he laughed.

'Hartwig, young man,'—he frequently called me Hartwig— 'I'm afraid your understanding of the poem is a little skewed from that of others. Most people interpret Kilmer's poem to be about the loveliness of nature, the inability of creations by man to match the sheer beauty of nature.'

'Most, you say,' I asked him. 'Not all?'

'Well, naturally, any poem is up for a different interpretation. Some of it requires stretching. In fact, it's possible for any poem to be about sex with a tree if your imagination reaches toward that inclination all the time.'

That was indeed what I had suspected all the time. I dropped the class and never looked back."

Cheese
"There was a time in my life I was convinced I could get a job endorsing a product. I was about 15, I think, relatively young, and had enough gusto to think I could do anything. In retrospect I should have tried to promote gusto, that I could've... (7/8/02)

Smoking
"I was one of the first people ever to give up smoking. I have no proof of that, really, but you can take me for my word. The year was 1950, when everyone had just started smoking. Already I knew it was a bad habit—my clothes smelled terrible,... (6/24/02)

Field Goal
"There was a roar of the crowd, the chilly wind blowing, the rattling of the weak bleachers we all sat on. It was the biggest game of the year, and our high school was involved. It was Oscar Wilde High School vs. the state champs, Karl Marx H.S. for... (5/27/02)