Monday's column was the 800th one I've written for this website. That's a lot of writing. If you assume each of my columns takes an hour to write, that works out to 33 straight days of writing, with no breaks for eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom. It's a massive amount of content, and I'm proud of it.
Well, except for this column. I mean, yikes, what was I thinking?
In honor of my 800th column, I've spent this whole week searching through my old columns to compile a list of my favorites. It wasn't easy. After hours and hours of skimming through everything on the site, I had 41 columns singled out. After a few more hours, I had the list down to 15. While I'm sure my taste differs from some of my readers, I think I picked out 10 gems that we can all agree are some of my best.
There may be some columns I overlooked, and if you think so, feel free to mention your favorite(s) in the comments section. Or your least favorite. With 800 columns, this process has been more a reminder of my failures than my successes. Especially in the year 2003. Wow, was I writing crap that year.
So without further ado, here's my top 10 Ramblings columns. This list includes high school and college columns as well as more recent ones, so some of you newer readers should get a kick out of reading the older stuff you missed. This weekend, I'll post some of the most controversial columns I've written in the blog.
#10: Today
August 10, 2005
I didn't include many recent columns in this list, but I like this one. It uses a rhythm and extremely short sentences to describe one of my horribly depressing work days at the weekly newspaper near La Crosse, WI. I'm not sure how I came up with the idea, but chances are that I was listening to a catchy song, started writing to the beat by accident, and decided to keep it up and see what happened.
#9: Mom! Old people are frightening me again!
June 7, 2002
This one's an oldie but a goodie. The humor is in the picture more than my writing. I had found a photo in my hometown newspaper of old ladies singing, and was terrified by it. So I just wrote down my worst fears about the people in the picture. I printed this column before comments were added to this site, but the amount of e-mails I got made it one of my most popular columns of all time.
#8: Forty-one questions and one important message
October 7, 2005
Here's another column that has a sort of rhythm to it. It started out as a mockery of infomercials, and ended up as a bizarre, perverted rhetorical questionnaire of sorts. "Strippers or janitors? Amish men or Mormon women?" These questions don't need answers, but they're fun.
#7: The doctrine of the unemployed
August 24, 2005
A rare serious column, this came right after I was fired/laid-off from my job as a reporter at the weekly newspaper near La Crosse, WI. I was still very angry and hurt about it all, and this was a safe way of airing the fear and anxiety I had not knowing if or when I'd ever get back on track with my life.
#6: The Anus Chronicles, part one
May 6, 2004
Whenever I write a dirty column, people tend to give it a low rating and chastise me for sickening them with unnecessary cursing and disgusting sexual references. So imagine my surprise when I write a 900-word short story about a detective named "Anus", and everyone applauds it. This column was the first and only attempt I've ever made to do a detective story. I had just gotten done reading an old James Bond novel, and my head was in the right place for it. Subscribers to the ill-fated paid members section of this site got to read part two of the story, which was shorter but much, much more violent. The rest of you can read it now, too.
#5: Let's pretend I'm a bus driver
July 12, 2002
This is a total rip-off from Chris Farley's bus driver character in the movie "Billy Madison". I won't even try to deny it. However, I like the version in my column better than the bus driver's lines in the movie, because the column includes the phrase "Would you liek to have your little bodies severed by ice cold steel walls of this fucking bus?!?"
#4: Touch Paul Ryan and get a damn quarter
October 13, 2000
My college years at the University of Wisconsin-Superior was a good time for columns. I wrote them for the college newspaper there for three and a half years. This one was one of the most popular. And yes, it was a sad ploy to get cute girls to touch me, and yes, it worked quite well, and yes, I did actually pay one person a quarter for touching me.
#3: The story of Paul
August 28, 2002
I don't like the title of this column, but the content is probably some of the best serious work I've written in recent years. I was working late one night for the newspaper near La Crosse, WI, and I started thinking about the difficulties I had running the student newspaper during college. The journalism program at the college was dying, and the head journalism professor there had done some nasty things (alleged rape of students and ethics violations) and had been on trial for almost the entire extent of my years there. It was a rough thing to deal with, being an inexperienced reporter with few staff members and a particularly nasty body of students and professors that all seemed to want the newspaper to die off. So this was another column I used to vent my frustrations, even ones that were still lingering from years past.
#2: What the hell?
February 21, 2005
It was a hard choice to put this column at number two instead of number one. In what my mom described as "Shakespearean porn", I printed an entire column in old-timey language, with many ridiculous perverted phrases invented along the way. "Tis thee a flower, or a diarrheanous mudslide of discontent? I choose neither, and instead climax in the corner of yonder tree fort with a handful of sugar." What can I say? I was in a weird mood.
#1: Please stop discussing my magnificent ass in public
April 25, 2001
I still remember the weird looks I got from professors at college the week after the newspaper came out with this column in it. I still consider it my best work, with enough ass references in a single column to set a world record. Combine that with photogenic phrases like "my sublime twin Moons rippling in unison", and you've got a Ramblings classic.
