When I was in middle school, in Arlington, Virginia, they gave us a test to see what sort of work we might be suited for. It’s never too early in your education to be jammed into a narrow slot, after all. According to the test, the worst thing I could get into was Speech Pathology, although the correct answer is Bus Driving. And my best job would be Author.

Which was cool, because authoring was what I wanted to do anyway. Specifically, I wanted to be a writing prodigy. So I spent some years writing bad poetry, turned seventeen in despair over having aged out of fame and glory, went to college for liberal arts and emerged four years later with a science degree, got a job doing unspeakable things to lab mice, bicycled across the country to Oregon, and spent a few years making scrimshaw, before landing my dream job: retired mail carrier. That took over thirty years of carrying mail but it was worth it.

And then, on the eve of retirement, I started writing. The first essay I sent out to a competition won the grand prize along with an insane amount of money.

This is easy, I thought.

And it is. The writing part, anyway, and the money part isn’t so important when you nabbed one of the last union jobs in America before the financial sector showed up in the 1980s to eat your pension. Which means I can write whatever I want. A lot of it is humor, but not all. You’ll find a bunch right here.