Community Bulletin Board

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.