I wrote this essay for and was luckily randomly picked to read it at NPR Illinois Stink Bug Night in 2019. The night's theme for a five-minute story was "Life and/or Death".
This is an essay I wrote concerning fruit, comedy, and language. The above picture was taken of me in 2018 when I read it at the Sherman Illinois Public Library once. Fortunately, I was not pelted with anything.
"Parasocial interaction" wasn't as much of a term when I wrote this in 2013 as it is now, but so as a concept it somewhat elucidates the fanatical feelings I've had (expressed herewith) on the music of the group Stars of the Lid.
Here is something about the magnificent Moody Blues, specifically their penchant for making transcendent music, whether they ever intended to do so or not.
This is an essay on matters pertaining to the history of terrestrial radio in the U.S., so called classic rock, and sudden realizations, mainly insofar as they revolve around the band Led Zeppelin and their 1975 song "Kashmir".
I wrote this as my final paper for William McBride's graduate Studies in Drama course at ISU in 1994. It's a frame-by-frame analysis of repressed gay male fantasies which are fleshed out through cinematic violence and play in the 1967 film The Incident.
Here is an essay, originally for William C. Woodson's Introduction to English Graduate Studies course at ISU, regarding W. H. Auden's 1940 satirical poem "The Unknown Citizen", which is a sort of epitaph for the modern worker as told through uncaring descriptions by government organizations. I posit stuff, mainly from a post-structuralist perspective.
In this essay for Tom Foster's graduate-level Cultural Studies course at ISU, I argue that John Fiske's concept of the culture industry in his book Understanding Popular Culture should be revised to allow for consumers to also be producers, in effect.

This latest piece is a novelette I've been working on. In the future, there are only a few humans left on the planet, most of the population having been decimated long ago by wars, pollution, and climate change. The few who remain party and enjoy tribute bands. Humans coexist with robots as well, and some robots have left the planet to explore the galaxy, though no one has heard from them since.
I wrote this for David Foster Wallace's graduate-level fiction course in spring 1994 at Illinois State University. Music is life, perpetually.
Another piece for DFW from '94, which I wrote right as "the internet"—at the time meaning simply telnet and gopher—was entering the scene. The near future evolution of technology meets its psychological limits.
Originally written for Curtis White's undergraduate creative writing fiction course at ISU circa 1992-93, parts of this were published in Druid's Cave: A Journal of the Creative Arts (1994). It's partly an homage to the work of author and mathematician Rudy Rucker. Druid's Cave was later renamed Euphemism, fortunately.
This is another piece I wrote for Curt's undergraduate course. The present state of the local rock band meets itself.

This is a poem I wrote for Mary Leen's undergraduate creative writing poetry course at Illinois State University in 1992. It was published in Druid's Cave (1993).
This is a poem I wrote in 2014. It's part of a larger collection of poetry of mine which is titled Thaw Zen.
This poem, also from Thaw Zen, was published in the OBERON Poetry Twelfth Annual Issue (2014).

These are a few rather adult-themed fictional extrapolations from LEGO boxes.
Here are 28 fictional news updates I originally composed for The Alleged Show. I've updated and enhanced them for the web, as per the custom of my kind.
Not to be confused with Drake the celebrity, the Drake Equation is not a person at all. Rather, it is a mathematical equation written in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake in an attempt to give scientists a fresh starting point at the first scientific meeting on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life (SETI). This is about my minor modification of that equation.
'Nuff said. Or maybe not. There's a first time for everything. I go into details.