Very Good Posting, Says Eric Horsting

Back when we were at Antioch, Amanda and I would spend most of our evenings having deep conversations in the C-shop or flailing and cursing unintelligibly in front of Tekken 3 in the fishbowl arcade. We were first year students in the Creative Writing Program under the tutelage of one Eric Horsting.

And that's as far as I'm going to go in explicating the inside joke that now stands as the title of this post.

Really, I'm posting to see if I can get this going again. Now that I am officially a very important writer, I think my trio of non-loyal readers will profit from my very important musings. (Though I regret the seeming immodesty with which I refer to these musings as "mine." Nay, I am but a humble conduit through which the overwhelming genius of the universe has deigned to speak.)

Here is an excerpt of what the universe channeled through me when I was 7:

Cathy is my sweetest friend
Cathy is so kind
Cathy is imaginary
she exists inside my mind.
But soon I must grow up
and leave Cathy behind
so that when I look for her,
Cathy I won't find.

I suppose I find the universe's inversion in the above emissary to be less than seamless, but who am I to judge.

At 8, the following was birthed from my subconscious like an inken Christ child from holy genitalia:

"My love is lost
like a needle in the hay,
I hope to find it
back some day."

We can only stand slack-jawed before the decisive power that would choose to render such powerfully unique thoughts of love via a child of 8…

Nineteen years later, I like to think that having written several thousand (bad) poems has forced me to grow as a writer (I mean, has enabled the universe to better use my body as its divine spittoon), but in reality I suspect that the poems with which I was somehow admitted to graduate school are simply the late-twenty something version of “Cathy” (which, and don’t tell the ether that I said this, is obviously a rip-off of “Puff the Magic Dragon”). Still, as Thoreau advises, I am going (quasi-)confidently in the direction of my dreams (the dreams of writing poetry, not the dreams I have at night, like the one where a group of hicks welded several differently shaped saws into the skull of a T. Rex, fitted it inside the emptied body of a crocodile, then used it to stalk and consume a smoking hipster boy).

And so you have been (nearly) brought up to speed. Here’s the rest: since my last post, I finally finished the last of my MFA applications, purchased the full 20-volume edition of the OED, helped to start an (ultimately unsuccessful) union, saw my only snowfall of the winter while at a porn convention in Las Vegas, met television’s “Screech,” found a one-hundred-dollar bill on the floor, quit my sex toy job, got hired for a sperm bank job, turned it down for a part-time editing job, did a one-armed push-up, lucked into a full ride (and then some) at the University of Oregon’s MFA program, got hammered on champagne with Lee, went to Hawaii, got married, accepted a free car from one of my neighbors, and learned the word “cankle” while watching VH1.

More soon. If I dare.