Some kids are cruel. Others just… curious with a mean streak. I wasn’t evil—but wicked? Absolutely. Wickedness is disruption without a mission, a laugh aimed squarely at the wrong authority. This one’s about how one laugh, wrong‑time, wrong‑place, ended up being exactly right.
Desire isn’t polite. It shows up early, misfires often, and makes a fool out of you long before it ever makes you human. These are the first sparks: a six-year-old whispering into a two‑by‑four, a minnow drafted into romance, a flood in God’s living room. Not exactly a love story, but close enough to bruise.
Pompous Jackassery and Mortal Concerns exists because I’ve failed at every other literary form. Novelist? Barely passable. Journalist? Unfit. Poet? Please. Essayist? Marginally above average—which is just enough to crash and burn among the illiterati. A sensible man would accept his creative fate and spend his evenings trying not to stare into the sun or eat too many crayons before dinner. I am not that man.
The woods behind my house smelled of pine sap, wet moss, and the metallic tang of mud. To me, they weren’t woods but a travel hub for everything extinct or imaginary. Dinosaurs stomped through sandy patches. Crocodiles blinked from rocks that weren’t rocks yesterday. The Cherokee whispered peace terms in the wind, smoke from their fires mixing—somehow—with the neighbor’s leaf pile.
The Guinness Book is full of lunatics chasing immortality.
Men who dunk their heads for apples until their lungs give out. Women who crochet scarves so long they could strangle Rhode Island. One guy painted the same baseball eighteen thousand times until it ballooned into a yoga ball. Another piled up 8,226 Batman trinkets, because apparently Gotham didn’t need his help.