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What Was That Noise?!
This is another very early piece I wrote. In law school or shortly thereafter. I published it on The Phat Phree a few years thereafter. I think it still holds up, and is in a style that I think I still write in today: something mundane, discussed in detail, as many jokes as I can pack in without making it a standup routine, and a healthy dose of absurdity.
New England Islands, A Gazetteer
I would occasionally do cartoons, parody magazines or comics, and other graphical pieces, like this one.
How I Really Met Your Mother
How I Met Your Mother was a thing then. So was me hitting a “rough patch” in my dating life. Looking at it now, it’s self-pitying and misogynistic, and also not really that funny. Exaggerated at the end, but otherwise is sort of a true story. Pretty lame, just with the How I Met Your Mother bit thrown over the top of it and a dark joke at the end. Oh, well. Glad that (being single) is over!
Top Cities for Seniors!
Five cities, five jokes. Nothing special here.
The Tao of Golf
I was playing more golf back then, I suppose. I like this one. In a lot of stuff, I tried to take real Taoist sayings, or Aesop’s fables, or whatever, and repurposing them or adding some absurd gloss on them. I think that can take a single, pretty lame joke (Keep your head down! and a few other golf/country club absurdities) and give them a bit of a higher-minded angle so they’re funnier, and more substantive.
Aesop’s Phables
Pretty straightforward bit here, but I really like this one.
Damn You, Journey!
OK, back to some better ones. This actually might have been the first piece I wrote for TPP because I remember writing it before I started writing for them, probably in 2004. I posted it on my own website that I had for like six months. This one got a little traction as well. At least, it popped up pretty high when you Googled Journey. I knew this because my roommates girlfriend was a huge Journey fan and found this online and loved it. She had no idea I had written it because I didn’t have my name on the site (because I’d just started my job as a lawyer and didn’t want my coworkers or clients seeing my stuff then) and shared it with her boyfriend who told me about it. I told him I wrote it and he didn’t believe me until I showed him the file on my computer and the website, etc. So, at that point I knew I could write stuff that at least some people enjoyed.
