A man on base is a man on base

This was my third year of university. All I can remember about this story and this time was being completely past the whole scene. Over them. Guh: undergraduate literary journals and their launch parties. There’s a line of Bruce McCulloch’s that I’d like on my Tombstone one day, and it certainly describes my headspace then. Cynicism was my whiskey, the line goes, and I’d had a few. The thing was that whiskey was also my whiskey, and beer my beer. At the launch of this Headlight, I went up for my allotted reading time, cynicism and whiskey and beer up to my eyes, and I decided that I was better than all of it. Everyone with their stupid little stories in this stupid little book. I decided to tell a story from off the top of my head and have it be better than anything in that book. The result was a slurred story about this kid I had played baseball with, this kid Peter. His mother was a dwarf and his father was a giant who owned a vacuum store in town, The Vacman. The only way for Peter get on base ever was to get hit by a pitch, and pretty soon that became his gimmick. Whenever he was up to bat, I swear he let his body list just enough over the plate. "Way to take one for the team, Peter!" the coached called. A man on base is a man on base, after all.

I won't go into my revised attitude about undergraduate literary anthologies. Or I'll just say they're good and important and let that be that. But I can't keep talking about my juvenile writings without talking about the juvenile attitudes and postures that came along with them. Stay tuned for a post on zines and what prompted me to opine, during a spoken word poetry performance, "That's the same sound I make when I come into my own mouth."