Reduced Employability + Heavy Student Loans = A Dire Predicament (Personal Entry)

Wow. I've been in college off-and-on for 6 years now. As you would imagine at this point, my student loans are crushing me! The state university routine is getting old at my 7th academic year.

Fall 2003

I don't often tell my age, as I am ashamed to, but I started going to K-State in the Fall of 2003. That year, tuition was $117 per credit-hour for resident undergrads. As the saying has been repeated many times and applied to many situations, "the first is the hardest." That semester was most certainly no exception.

I had as much of a grasp at this brand-new college routine as a novice rodeo rider has on a bronco, and I am NOT referring to OJ's SUV! There were also too many distractions that I couldn't resist at Marlatt Hall, a residence hall I stayed at for my first two semesters at K-State. Halo (the first iteration) was brand-new, and the "in thing" at Marlatt, so everybody (except for the more avid studying types) wanted to play that award-winning and revolutionary first-person shooter. There were a lot more distractions, like anime movies in an anime geek's room, but that's not the focus of this journal entry.

All of that caused me to slip on my studies and academic performance. I was too concerned with my desire to satiate myself with fun, more than I was with doing well in school. We did get a warning early on, that any freshman who gets under a 1.0 GPA their Fall semester would be dismissed, and that this warning was the only warning. (Any student with a 1.0 to a 1.99 would get put on "Academic Warning," with the stipulation that they pull their semester GPA above a 2.0 to continue being a K-Stater.

Sometime after the end of that semester, I checked for my grades on KATS (a precursor to iSIS,) and I had failed ALL my classes that I hadn't already withdrawn from. (I withdrew from French and Expository Writing I before the final drop deadline on the last week of October.) My academic status read: "Dismissal"

I planned on pleading my case through DSS and to my Engineering Dean - about how this PILOTS program for freshmen was to have me "fly through college instead of drag," and therefore help improve my academic standing that semester, but that by the time I heard about it in about the 1st or 2nd week of October, the program was full and couldn't accept any more students. Meanwhile, I put it off so I could enjoy my Christmas Break with my family.

Spring 2004

Sometime in the 1st week of January, Mom got the dismissal notification letter first. (I had planned to intercept it at the post office.) We had an argument, then I told her of my plan to appeal and override the dismissal. I typed up an essay with my pleadings as to why I should be given a second chance. The next day (or so), she sent me off to Manhattan to give it to DSS and Dean Ray Hightower.

I first had it critiqued by the head of DSS, and she gave praises and other positive remarks about the essay, so that greatly increased my hope. (I also had printouts of lists of successful and prominent luminaries who have/had the same pre-existing condition that I do, so I could show the Dean how, if I'm given a second chance, and the accommodations that go with this second chance, that I could end up on that list someday.)

I then met with the Dean, and won my second chance! He then proceeded to give me a motivating pep talk about how I must improve my academics that spring because if I fail again, I wouldn't need "to waste anymore of my money" and that I'd have to find a wholly different path in life. Next, Ray produced and filled out the forms to make a backdated withdrawal on all of my failed classes, and gave me directions on where to send these forms. (I believe it was Willard Hall first, then Eisenhower Hall second.)

I happily closed the meeting and excitedly did just that. Even though the trip to each hall was a 5-10-minute walk, it felt as brisk as a motor-scooter ride. Time flew during the time that it took to complete all my backdated withdrawals!

Later, I met with Rebecca Paz, an assistant head of the PILOTS program and advisor, who wanted to make sure that I succeeded so much, that she stipulated that I am to only take 7 credit hours in the Spring of 2004 if I was going to be a part of the PILOTS program, a program I learned to covet being in so much. I hesitated at first, because there were plenty of classes I wanted to be in, but I had to learn to put them off for the future. Therefore, I enrolled in 7 credits and didn't have to move out of Marlatt Hall after all. Upon returning to Marlatt, I told my hallmates how excited I was to be back, therefore disproving some of their hypotheses that I was going to fail out! (Somebody did find one of my graded College Algebra tests that previous fall, so the word spread that I was most likely going to fail out of there.)

I went through the Spring more easily than the Fall, due to my reduced credit load, and passed that semester.

Summer 2004

Then Hell hit.

I was forced to live in a very run-down apartment of one of the rental properties they owned, because I didn't have a stable income (only mowing lawns for $25 per yard was the best I could get) and being college-aged, they wanted me to be self-sufficient, so they didn't want me to live with and mooch off of them at their house back in Chapman the whole summer.

My car couldn't start, and Mom made me enroll in a free summer class ANYWAY on the Fort Riley campus of Barton County CC. She told me to ride my bike, ALL THE WAY FROM JUNCTION CITY, and up Custer Hill, to get to that class. I had a stopwatch, so on my first day that I had to ride my bike, I timed 44 minutes, 31 seconds from my apartment to the class building's bike rack. (I believe it was actually a step handrail.) I was also about 20-25 minutes late because I mis-estimated how long it would take to pedal there. I also had developed a tan-line of my tank-top that same day!

Later, I got my beater jump-started and was able to drive to class and back, but it was still a 15-minute commute, and I didn't (and still don't) like long commutes. Eventually, the fact that I don't like mornings, plus my dreadful commutes, caused me to miss a lot of classes, so I had to drop that summer class.

Summer was drawing to a close, and I still owed $3,292 on my Residence Hall rent. (In the 2003-2004 school-year, the rent for a regular room in the Residence Halls totaled $2,400 per semester, with a 20-meal dining plan. It was still exorbitant compared to my rent at an off-campus apartment THIS year, which is $3,500 for 10 months before utilities.) That caused me to be unable to enroll.

Fall 2004

Later, Mom, in one of her rare acts of grace, decided to pay the $3,292 to Housing & Dining. However, Rebecca Paz said that PILOTS already had 167 students enrolled in that program by that time, so I couldn't get in, which discouraged me from enrolling. I did get a job at a tedious (for employees) fast-food store in Manhattan, so I was going to have a class or two at K-State before going to work, which would ensure that I would never be late for work. JC to Manhattan was a 20-odd-mile commute, which I grew to hate of course.

I decided to try again with the free college at Fort Riley, as I was so financially desperate at the time. It was held sometime in the late morning, and I did well going to the Econ class many times for a while, but I still missed a few classes because I would be a late-waker. Then when I found out that I missed a test, I had to drop that course as well. It was a half-semester-long course, so I enrolled in a couple more classes for the next half. They were 5 days a week, and I hated that it had to be that often.

After the first 3 days, I started to miss classes again. The fact that my squalid apartment didn't let in hardly any sunlight was no help to my circadian rhythm. (I find that even if I fell asleep at 5 in the morning on the 3rd floor of our Lindsborg home years later, the AMPLE light shining through that floor's windows caused me to get up, fairly energized, at 10! Sunlight can certainly make short work of my body's process to regain energy in my slumber.)

Eventually, I had to drop those classes too.

Homeless in Spring 2005

By January 2005, I was getting so thoroughly fed up at my Junction City apartment, and the 20-mile long commute to my miserable job, that I had decided to enroll for classes at K-State ANYWAY. Sure, my apartment was one of the WORST environments to focus and study in, but I didn't plan to live in that hellhole any longer. I decided to sleep in the Hale library, and mooch off of my friends by staying at their residence halls on weekends. There, I would also shower and do other great things to hygienically take care of myself.

Being homeless and a library dweller was FAR better than living in my apartment and commuting because the library was FAR more opulent, and even though the best I could sleep in were only the two-cushion couches that were as long as I was tall when I was 12 or 13, they suddenly seemed to me like king-sized massaging memory foam beds! This was significantly an improvement of my living accommodations, though it was less something to want to divulge to casual friends and new acquaintances than before. ("I sleep in the library," as opposed to "I have an apartment.")

I enrolled in 8 credits. If I was going to pass them, I would have only accumulated 15 credit hours in TWO years. I couldn't get myself to enroll full-time because I knew that reduced sleep and the vagaries of homelessness would not be the best environment to work a full-time course load in.

Despite the reduced credit load, the vagaries of homelessness still took a toll on my academics, so I didn't even accumulate the full 8. I had to retake a couple of the classes in future semesters in order to advance (and with something respectable.)

Because a government department ruled that my pre-existing condition made me less employable, I got an SSI income! I started receiving it in March or April, but since I mailed in the application that last October, they decided to backdate my pay, therefore, I netted over $2,000 in my account!

New digs, and a new confidence in Summer and Fall 2005

That summer, I started looking for a place to rent. My family let me stay at their house every night because they knew I was certainly on the road to getting my own place to live! This was another improvement in my living accommodations. Eventually, I found an apartment owned by Manhattan Christian College. It was a hugely excellent location - just a block and a half south of Nichols Hall, and even though the apartment was a basement unit, it was clean and well-maintained, carpet newly shampooed, and most certainly a vast number of steps up in quality from my old apartment in Junction City. We did the paperwork, had my Mom co-sign the lease (so that she pays in case I start being unable to for some reason, which fortunately hasn't happened yet,) and I got the keys to it and the mailbox, on June 30, 2005.

I had thought that my academics would experience a VAST improvement, now that I had a highly decent place to stay, this time without all the distractions that the residence halls have. I happily enjoyed the rest of the summer and prepared to return to college that August.

I enrolled in 13 credits, confident that my vastly improved living situation would allow me to thrive with it. Things seemed going smoothly for a while. Then I used my student loan refunds to purchase a new PC from Dell, at a total cost of $1,381.25. I then used it also to buy some award-winning video games, like "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Academy." I defeated that game in 2 weeks, and played other great games that semester.

An All-Withdrawal, once again

Which turned out to be a detriment to my academics. I asked my advisor to get progress reports from all my instructors. When they came back several days later, none of them sounded good. I also had trouble getting up in the mornings like before. I guess it was the basement's low sunlight penetration (even though there was more sunlight let in than my previous dump of an apartment.) What broke my semester the most though, was my tendency to stay up deep into the night playing games and surfing the Internet much of the time. I had enrolled in an 8:30 University Experience class confident that I would have loud enough alarm clocks to get me up no matter how tired I'd be. At the beginning of that semester, the head of the PILOTS program at the time, Anita Cortez, had warned me that I would have to get "a Big Ben" in response to my being so confident over getting up so early.

It was the last week of October and things weren't looking good for any of my classes at all. The only chance I had at keeping on going at K-State is if I withdrew from all my classes and came back that Spring. I had the PILOTS advisor, Barrett Bowlin, drop all my classes. After that, we still met on a weekly basis to plan how I was going to improve next semester. I also got a notification from the Cashier's Office (or was it Financial Aid?) that $636.80 was returned by K-State to Sallie Mae (or the Department of Education) and this is how much I owed. I still managed to enroll for next semester though.

Spring 2006

Barrett stipulated that I enroll part-time again, so I did. I came out just fine with a 2.5 semester GPA by the end of Spring 2006. Only counting the passed classes that counted towards graduation, I had netted a total of just 12 credit-hours in three years.

Fall 2006

I doubled that total in just one semester that following fall, with all B's. Having earned a 3.0 semester GPA, that was academically, and still is, my best semester ever at Kansas State University.

Fall 2006 was also when I started to max out my "alternative" (private signature) loans. I had used it to pay off my entire $5,000 credit card balance, tune up my car, and eat out at the Union Food Court more often. Unfortunately, I turned right around and spent with that credit card like a terminal cancer patient! I was living the high life for a while, and even got "convenience checks" sent to me, which were checks for my credit card. My parents have told me for a while that I was to pay them back their Parent PLUS loans, so when I had this line of credit, I happily wrote them the check for the ~$1,540 that I owed them.

Spring 2007, and Ben Kohl's LONG memory

The next semester, my sights were set for Studying Abroad in Japan. I filled out whatever paperwork I needed to, then the time came to meet with Ben Kohl, an Assistant Director of Financial Aid who was specially assigned to advise students planning to Study Abroad. He actually remembered me from my Freshman year! This was indicated by him asking, "Hey, I think you're graduating at around this time, aren't you?" I asked, "What?" He repeated, so I replied, "Now what makes you say that?!"

He stated that he remembered me from the Kramer Dining Center I used to have my meals at. I then recalled that he was one of their employees that year; I didn't recall his specific job. I just told him that, "Oh, I've changed my major several times, so I know I still have a while to go!" He was okay with that response; numerous other K-Staters have this situation too.

I then inquired about how he could possibly remember me out of the THOUSANDS of students he must've dealt with in the 3 3/4 years between these times! He just stated, "I remember lots of people!"

We both went to his cubicle, and he loaded up my electronic dossier on a Staff-only vector of KATS/iSIS. He gave the screen a miffed look, then asked, "You only have 24 credit-hours?!"

"What? No way! Well in that case, it'll be 37 when this semester's done."

"So what's been your situation this past 4 years then?!"

"I had to take a part-time credit load a few times because the college routine was a lot to get used to, and some bad life situations happened."

"You also took some semesters off from going to K-State, didn't you?"

"Well, ONE semester, yeah. It was for financial reasons; I couldn't afford a place to stay that time."

Ben proceeded to process my unique financial aid that I would need for my trip to Japan, but his discovery and long memory had made my lethargic progress finally caught up to me!

At just 37 credit-hours in 4 years, I knew I was in it for the long haul. In that amount of time, assuming that a typical K-Stater only took the minimum required to be considered full-time at 12 credit-hours per semester, I only accumulated 37/96ths of what a consistently full-time student would have at least had, which is about ~38.542% of the progress that I should've been making.

Studying in Japan

I will not go further in-depth about my credit-hour progress anymore, but in the Spring & Summer of 2008, I studied in Japan. I got all the extra Financial Aid needed to finance my trip, and used plenty of that money to buy the laptop that I am typing on right now.

My semester in Japan went well academically: It didn't matter as much what grades I got; the grades determined pass/fail, and on all my classes, I passed, so I added 12 more credit-hours at that time.

Fall 2008

A short time after my 15-day hop back to Kansas, I had to take out a great amount in private loans to pay Mom back another $3,000 she had me borrow from her for an unforeseen expense in Japan, and I used some of the same loan refund to buy a $564 washlet that I have gotten enjoyably accustomed to while living in the Land of the Rising Sun. I don't like to discuss it much, but I DREADED the prospect of returning to the old way after flying back to the United States.

Spring 2009

As most of my loans designated for the Spring semester were already tapped out in an emergency funding to finance my return home, I was only able to tap $744 in Spring 2009. I used most of it to pay off a chunk of my credit-card debt.

A 2012 Apocalypse could wipe my slate clean of student loans! Or so I thought.

I maxed out taking out my alternative loans from Fall 2006 because I went under the spell of believing that the over-hyped 2012 apocalypse was going to destroy Sallie Mae and cause my student loans to be forgiven while I hid out in a bomb shelter somewhere. (I greatly encourage you to view "2012" in theaters this November 13th! Watch this trailer below:)



That spell was broken when I checked my academic progress sometime in the March of 2009 and realized that I would fail out that semester if I didn't pull up, as I had already gotten a Warning that previous Fall. I had 12 credits that Fall, but had to drop an Expos II course and a couple of CIS classes because something botched and I was playing too much Spore that time. Also, my Expository Writing II instructor didn't have the most pleasing disposition either. You can imagine the grades on the classes I kept.

That's why I took 8 credit-hours the following Spring. In the beginning, I added ECON 120 (Microeconomics) as a "dummy class" (or "filler class") so that I would get a financial aid refund from dropping it before the 100% refund deadline.

I pulled up in my grades and got a "B" in Expository Writing II. Abby Knoblauch was a far more amicable and easygoing teacher than my previous Expos II instructor was.

In the meantime, my personal policy is that if I get any less than a "C" as a final grade in any of my classes, I MUST repeat them until I pull it up. That is what I've done for some of my classes already, and I was doing no different for COMM 323 - Interpersonal Communication. I got a "D" in it that previous Fall, and was on a track to getting an "F" in the repeat of it this Spring, but I put forth the extra effort to pull it up. Sadly though, I was just 2.5% away from breaking a "C" by semester's end, so I will have to take it the third time in Spring 2010.

My spell broke!

While I was in those classes, my initial poor progress put me under threat of a dismissal, and being under threat of dismissal broke my spell!

When I was under threat of dismissal, I called Sallie Mae to have them calculate how much I would have to pay back in loans every month if I quit school this Spring. The amount they stated: $556 (and change.)

I told them that this wouldn't be possible, as I wouldn't have enough leftover for rent, much less other necessities, then they calculated a reduced rate plan. The reduced rate would be about ~$320 a month. After JUST rent, I would only have $4 left over every month.

I couldn't have either. I asked them how it would be possible to lower it to $40/month, Sallie Mae's absolute minimum loan-paying rate for any student loan, because I could handle $40/month no problem. They said that this wouldn't work, but that I can apply for Economic Forbearance.

After getting off the phone, I learned that I can only be under the "Economic Forbearance" condition for up to 4 years (or was it 2?) I tried to contemplate how I'd be living and saving up to start paying it back while I would live these 4 years, then figured that the daily worries over this loan coming back would stress me to no end, and high stress causes undue health issues.

This new, large worry also caused me to heavily think, "And even if I still don't have to pay back those loans to December 21, 2012, what if that day just comes and goes? What if there is NO APOCALYPSE?"

I thought about that for a while, then it was decided. My spell was broken and I no longer wanted to borrow private loans like there was no tomorrow. I was not going to hold the mentality and thought process of a "healthy terminal cancer patient" anymore. I was going to stop taking out private loans, and start paying them back while I still went to college!

Paying back starting from Fall 2009

You see, private loans are stricter in making us pay them back than federally-guaranteed loans are.

Private loans have a fixed per-month payment plan (or two, apparently,) no matter how much income the former student earns.

Public loans, on the other hand, are far more flexible and lenient with the former student - they allow the student to choose to pay back a percentage of their income. (I personally, would choose to pay back 10% of my income each month. I can live with that.) (The minimum percentage rate is 4%.) That's not the only option; there are more payment plans available with these public loans, but I'll not go into them here.

Therefore, I have decided to pay for my private loans with my public loans. I already took care of the first - the $744 loan from Spring 2009 that had a 12.125% interest rate - the highest of them all.

Now that I am also receiving the Pell, Eisenhower and SEOG grants, paying these other debts have gotten easier. I also used these public loan & grant refunds to pay off the remaining credit card balance - about $3300-$3400 of the $5000 credit line.

Future plans to pay the rest off

I will then use my next semester's disbursements to pay off my next worst private loan on the list, and will keep going until all private loans are paid off, which will take MANY semesters. Then the unsubsidized public loans will be paid off by the grants and subsidized public loans, then the subsidized public loans come next by the Perkins and grants, then the Perkins Loans come last by the grant refunds.

Currently, I owe $57,808.14, and the projected monthly payment has risen to $605.31. While I get $674/month in SSI in 2009, that is not at all any way to live! Moreover, at this point, you can imagine how long I would take to pay back my loans with the strategy described in the above paragraph.

K-State's tuition and fees rise every semester, and the state university routine is getting old, so that is why I plan to join the Navy or Air Force this summer. They promise a dissolution of all my student loans after 3 years of service, and if they can't pay back every last one of them, at least my military income ought to suffice.

If I can't join the military though, I will start taking classes at Manhattan Area Technical college, whose tuition is less than half of K-State's. Therefore, paying higher-interest loans with the refunds of grants and lower-interest loans, will be a quicker process through being enrolled at MATC. After transferring as many credits as I can there from K-State, I will have a head-start. Once I earn an associate's degree at MATC, I'll look for a job in town. If I can't find it after one summer, then I guess I'll have to start on 2nd associate's degree until I finally land a job.

Conclusion

After so many years of dragging through a state university, I have come to the notion that the routine at a state university might not be for me after all. Thomas Edison didn't go to any kind of college whatsoever, and look at what he became anyhow! For me, a technical college might be my better fit. I haven't gone to one so I won't yet know for sure, but I would sure hope so.

I've grown up in a military family, so I may be better suited to the military than I think. All I have to do is pass all my health checks and other checks at MEPS, then I get sworn in.

I have accumulated a total of only 63 credit hours and this is my 7th year at K-State (6 excluding the Fall 2004 semester that I wasn't enrolled, and Spring 2008 semester that I was in Japan, but my 7th year in any college.) This is nothing to be too proud about, but at least it gives me a considerable head-start if I enroll in a technical college.

I'm on track to having 79 credits by December, which means that assuming I take a full-time load again this spring, in May, I will finally be a SENIOR!!!

This is one more reason why I don't like to give my age. One time in August, when I took my sister to synagogue (our family is split by 2 religions and 2 denominations), as I got acquainted with the members there, they asked me what year I was, and I told them that I'm currently a Junior.

About 15-20 minutes later, while we were having their dinner, one of the senior asked how old I was. When I told him, the girl sitting across from me looked and sounded upset when she asked the member next to her, "And he said he was a Junior???"

I do not want a repeat of that situation, even though we did part ways on a good note. (That was evidently her "tatemae," and her "honne" still likely remained worse at that point. I learned those two terms when I studied in Japan.)

Many of my friends ran through college like a brook or a rapid. Some even whizzed through as straight as a canal. If the time I take to progress in college was analogized in how straight our rivers run, my river would be one of the most meandering rivers in the country, with a few oxbow lakes along the route. (In this analogy, oxbow lakes are the semesters and/or classes I withdrew from.)

Eventually, we reach the ocean, a lake, or a bigger river. It's almost inevitable. I say almost because I once read that the Rio Grande ends about 50 feet before the coastline. Illegal immigrants were able to simply drive across the exposed sand to get to our Promised Land. The Border Patrol have since constructed a berm to stop those drives.

I do not want my academic career to end up like the Rio Grande. I want it to pour into something bigger, and even though the hardships of college life have slowed me down, it has not managed to stop me. I have persevered, and I will go on - to either the Apocalypse, or a post-college career. I will not; I cannot stop simply at the taking of the scroll while wearing a cap & gown, because there is one more step and at this point, you all know what that is. If I cannot pass that step, I go back to college. If I do pass, then I will be financially secure and not dread the loans any longer. In short, I will have finally reached adulthood.

from Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer (Literary Entry)

This is a required reading assignment for a university literary class. As this work is found in a few places elsewhere online, I have decided to set a precedent for many college students everywhere who so desperately look for a re-posted work online to copy-&-paste to a text-to-speech program. By having it read back to them, they spend a fraction of the effort otherwise spent manually reading this passage. Students seek paths of least resistance. I am constructing one of them.

Summit 1:25 PM, May 10, 1996, 29,028 feet

Our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of the weather hut for the sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account, and finally, hut for the storm which has fallen on us within 11 miles of the depot at which we hoped to secure our final supplies. Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow... We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, hut bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last...

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

--Robert Falcon Scott, in "Message to the Public," penned just prior to his death in Antarctica on March 29, 1912, from Scott's Last Expedition

Scott Fischer ascended to the summit around 3:40 on the afternoon of May 10 to find his devoted friend and sirdar, Lopsang Jangbu, waiting for him. The Sherpa pulled his radio from inside his down jacket, made contact with Ingrid Hunt at Base Camp, then handed the walkie-talkie to Fischer. "We all made it," Fischer told Hunt, 11,400 feet below. "God, I'm tired." A few minutes later Makalu Gau arrived with two Sherpas. Rob Hall was there, too, waiting impatiently for as a rising tide of cloud lapped ominously at V, Doug Hansen to appear the summit ridge.According to Lopsang, during the fifeen or twenty minutes Fischer spent on the summit, he complained repeatedly that he wasn't feeling well-something the congenitally stoic guide almost never did. "Scott tell to me, I am too tired. I am sick, also, need medicine for stomach,` the Sherpa recalls. "I gave him tea, but he drank just a little bit, just half cup. So I tell to him, 'Scott, please, we go fast down." So we come down then." Fischer started down first, about 3:55. Lopsang reports that although Scott had used supplemental oxygen during the entire ascent and his third canister was more than three-quarters full when he left the summit, for some reason he took his mask off and stopped using it.Shortly after Fischer left the top, Gau and his Sherpas departed as well, and finally Lopsang headed down-leaving Hall alone on the summit awaiting Hansen. A moment after Lopsang started down, about 4:00, Hansen at last appeared, toughing it out, moving painfully slowly over the last bump on the ridge. As soon as he saw Hansen, Hall hurried down to meet him.Hall's obligatory turn-around time had come and gone a full two hours earlier. Given the guide's conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. Why, they wondered, didn't he turn Hansen around much lower on the mountain, as soon as it became obvious that the American climber was running late? Exactly one year earlier, Hall had turned Hansen around on the South Summit at 2:30 P.M and to be denied so close to the top was a crushing disappointment to Hansen. He told me several times that he'd returned to Everest in 1996 largely as a result of Hall's advo T cacy-he said Rob had called him from New Zealand "a dozen times" urging him to give it another shot-and this time Doug was absolutely determined to bag the top. "I want to get this thing done and out of my life," he'd told me three days earlier at Camp Two."I don't want to have to come back here. I'm getting too old for this shit." It doesn't seem far-fetched to speculate that because Hall had talked Hansen into coming back to Everest, it would have been especially hard for him to deny Hansen the summit a second time. "It's very difficult to turn someone around high on the mountain," cautions Guy Cotter, a New Zealand guide who summitted Everest with Hall in 1992 and was guiding the peak for him in 1995 when Hansen made his first attempt."If a client sees that the summit is close and they're dead-set on getting there, they're going to laugh in your face and keep going up." As the veteran American guide Peter Lev told Climbing magazine after the disastrous events on Everest, "We think that people pay us to make good decisions, but what people really pay for is to get to the top.In any case, Hall did not turn Hansen around at 2:00 Pm.-or, for that matter, at 4:00, when he met his client just below the top. Instead, according to Lopsang, Hall placed Hansen's arm around his neck and assisted the weary client up the final forty feet to the summit. They stayed only a minute or two, then turned to begin the long descent.When Lopsang saw that Hansen was faltering, he held up his own descent long enough to make sure Doug and Rob made it safely across a dangerously corniced area just below the top. Then, eager to catch Fischer, who was by now more than thirty minutes ahead of him, the Sherpa continued down the ridge, leaving Hansen and Hall at the top of the Hillary Step, just after Lopsang disappeared down the Step, Hansen apparently ran Out of oxygen and foundered. He'd expended every last bit of his strength to reach the summit-and now there was nothing left in reserve for the descent. "Pretty much the same thing happened to Doug in '95, " says Ed Viesturs, who, like Cotter, was guiding the peak for Hall that year."He was fine during the ascent, but as soon as he started down he lost it mentally and physically; he turned into a zombie, like he'd used everything up.At 4:30 P.M and again at 4:41, Hall got on the radio to say that he and Hansen were in trouble high on the summit ridge and urgently needed oxygen. Two full bottles were waiting for them at the South Summit; if Hall had known this he could have retrieved the gas fairly quickly and then climbed back up to give Hansen a fresh tank. But Andy Harris, still at the oxygen cache, in-the throes of his hypoxic dementia, overheard these radio calls and broke in to tell Hall-incorrectly, just as he'd told Mike Groom and me-that all the bottles at the South Summit were empty.Groom heard the conversation between Harris and Hall on his radio as he was descending the Southeast Ridge with Yasuko Namba, just above the Balcony. He tried to call Hall to correct the misinformation and let him know that there were in fact full oxygen canisters waiting for him at the South Summit, but, Groom explains, "my radio was malfunctioning.I was able to receive most calls, but my outgoing calls could rarely be heard by anyone. On the couple of occasions that my calls were being picked up by Rob, and I tried to tell him where the full cylinders were, I was immediately interrupted by Andy, transmitting to say there was no gas at the South Summit." Unsure whether there was oxygen waiting for him, Hall decided that the best course of action was to remain with Hansen and try to bring the nearly helpless client down without gas. But when they got to the top of the Hillary Step, Hall couldn't get Hansen down the 40-foot vertical drop, and their progress ground to a halt Shortly before 5:00, Groom finally managed to get through to Hall and communicate that there actually was oxygen at the South Summit. Fifteen minutes later, Lopsang arrived at the South Summit on his way down from the top and encountered Harris.* At this point, according to Lopsang, Harris must have finally understood that at least two of the oxygen canisters stashed there were full, because he pleaded with the Sherpa to help him carry the life-sustaining gas up to Hall and Hansen on the Hillary Step. "Andy says he will pay me five hundred dollars to bring oxygen to Rob and Doug," Lopsang recalls.It wasn't until I interviewed Lopsang in Seattle on July 25, 1996, that I learned he had seen Harris on the evening of May 10. Although I'd spoken briefly with Lopsang several times previously, I'd never thought to ask whether he'd encountered Harris on the South Summit, because at that point I was still certain I'd seen Harris at the South Col, 3,000 feet below the South Summit, at 6:30 Pm. Moreover, Guy Cotter had asked Lopsang if he'd seen Harris, and for some reason-perhaps a simple misunderstanding of the question-on that occasion Lopsang said no."But I am supposed to take care of just my group. I have to take care of Scott. So I say to Andy, no, I go fast down." A t 5:30, as Lopsang left the South Summit to resume his descent, he turned to see Harris-who must have been severely debilitated, if N his condition when I'd seen him on the South Summit two hours earlier was any indication-plodding slowly up the summit ridge to assist Hall and Hansen. It was an act of heroism that would cost Harris his life.A few hundred feet below, Scott Fischer was struggling down the Southeast Ridge, growing weaker and weaker. Upon reaching the top of the rock steps at 28,400 feet, he was confronted with a series of short but troublesome rappers that angled along the ridge. Too exhausted to cope with the complexities of the roe work, Fischer slid p p directly down an adjacent snow slope on his butt. This was easier than following the fixed lines, but once he was below the level of the rock steps it meant that he had to make a laborious 330-foot rising traverse through knee-deep snow to regain the route.Tim Madsen, descending with Beidleman's group, happened to glance up from the Balcony around 5:20 and saw Fischer as he began the traverse."He looked really tired , Madsen remembers. "He'd take ten steps, then sit and rest, take a couple more steps, rest again.He was moving real slow. But I could see Lopsang above him, coming down the ridge, and I figured, shoot, with Lopsang there to look after him, Scott would be O.K.

According to Lopsang, the Sherpa caught up with Fischer about 6:00 Pm just above the Balcony: "Scott is not using oxygen, so I put mask on him. He says, 'I am very sick, too sick to go down. I am going to jump." He is saying many times, acting like crazy man, so I tie him on rope, quickly, otherwise he is jumping down into Tibet." Securing Fischer with a 75-foot length of rope, Lopsang persuaded his friend not to jump and then got him moving slowly toward the South Col."The storm is very bad now," Lopsang recalls. "BOOM! BOOM! Two times like sound of gun, there is big thunder. Two times Very loud, very scared." lightning hit very close near me and Scott, v Three hundred feet below the Balcony, the gentle snow gully they'd been gingerly descending gave way to outcroppings of loose, steep shale, and Fischer was unable to handle the challenging terrain in his ailing condition. "Scott cannot walk now, I have big problem," says Lopsang."I try to carry, but I am also very tired. Scott is big body, all; I cannot carry him. He tell to me, 'Lopsang, you go down. I am very ssick.You go down." I tell to him.'No, I stay together here with you.About 8:00 Pm Lopsang was huddling with Fischer on a snowcovered ledge when Makalu Gau and his two Sherpas appeared out of the howling blizzard. Gau was nearly as debilitated as Fischer and was likewise unable to descend the difficult bands of shale, so his Sherpas sat the Taiwanese climber beside Lopsang and Fischer and then continued down without him."I stay with Scott and Makalu one hour, maybe longer, " says Lopsang."I am very cold, very tired. Scott tell to me, 'You go down, send up Anatoli." So I say, 'O.K I go down, I send quick Sherpa up and Anatoh." Then I make good place for Scott and go down." Lopsang left Fischer and Gau on a ledge 1,200 feet abov the South Col and fought his way down through the storm. Unable to see, he got far off route toward the west, ended up below the level of the Col before he realized his error, and was forced to climb back up the northern margin of the Lhotse Face* to locate Camp Four. Around midnight, nevertheless, he made it to safety. "I go to Anatoli tent," reported Lopsang. "I tell to Anatoli, 'Please, you go up, Scott is very sick, he cannot walk.Then I go to my tent, just fall asleep, sleep like dead person." Early the next morning while searching the Col for Andy Harris, I came across Lopsang's faint crampon tracks in the ice leading up from the lip of the Lhotse Face, and mistakenly believed they were Harris's tracks headed down the face-which is why I thought Harris had walked off the edge of the Col. Guy Cotter, a longtime friend of both Hall's and Harris's, happened to be a few miles from Everest Base Camp on the afternoon of May 10, where he was guiding an expedition on Pumori, and had been monitoring Hall's radio transmissions throughout the day.At 2:15 Pm. he talked to Hall on the summit, and everything sounded fine. At 4:30 and 4:41, however, Hall called down to say that Doug was out of oxygen and unable to move, and Cotter became very alarmed.At 4:53 he got on the radio and strongly urged Hall to descend to the South Summit. "The call was mostly to convince him to come down and get some gas," says Cotter, "because we knew he wasn't going to be able to do anything for Doug without it. Rob said he could get himself down o. K but not with Doug." But forty minutes later, Hall was still with Hansen atop the Hillary Step, going nowhere. During radio calls from Hall at 5:36, and again at 5:57, Cotter implored his mate to leave Hansen and come down alone."I know I sound like the bastard for telling Rob to abandon his client," confessed Cotter, "but by then it was obvious that leaving Doug was his only choice." Hall, however, wouldn't consider going down without Hansen.There was no further word from Hall until the middle of the night. At 2:46 A.M Cotter woke up in his tent below Pumori to hear a long, broken transmission, probably unintended: Hall had been wearing a remote microphone clipped to the shoulder strap of his backpack, which was occasionally keyed on by mistake. In this instance, says Cotter, "I suspect Rob didn't even know he was transmitting. I could hear someone yelling-it might have been Rob, but I couldn't be sure because the wind was so loud in the background. But he was saying something like, 'Keep moving! Keep going!" presumably to Doug, urging him on." If this was indeed the case, it meant that in the wee hours of the morning Hall and Hansen-perhaps accompanied by Harris-were still struggling from the Hillary Step toward the South Summit through the gale. And if so, it also meant that it had taken them more than ten hours to move down a stretch of ridge that was typically covcred by descending climbers in less than half an hour.Of course, this is highly speculative. all that is certain is that Hall called down at 5:57 Pm. At that point, he and Hansen were still on the Step; and at 4:43 on the morning of May 11, when he next spoke to Base Camp, he had descended to the South Summit. And at that point neither Hansen nor Harris was with him.In a series of transmissions over the next two hours, Rob sounded disturbingly confused and irrational. During the call at 4:43 A.M he told Caroline Mackenzie, our Base Camp doctor, that his legs no longer worked, and that he was "too clumsy to move." In a ragged, barely audible voice, Rob croaked, "Harold was with me last night, but he doesn't seem to be with me now. He was very weak." Then, obviously befuddled, he asked, "Was Harold with me? Can you tell me that?" By this point Hall had possession of two full oxygen canisters, but the valves on his mask were so choked with ice that he couldn't get the gas to flow. He indicated, however, that he was attempting to deice the oxygen rig, "which," says Cotter, "made us all feel a little better.It was the first positive thing we'd heard." At 5:00 A.M Base Camp patched through a call on the satellite telephone to Jan Arnold, Hall's wife, in Christchurch, New Zealand.She had climbed to the summit of Everest with Hall in 1993, and she entertained no illusions about the gravity of her husband's predicament."My heart really sank when I heard his voice," she recalls.He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something, like he was just floating away. I'd been up there; I knew what it could be like in bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, "You might as well be on the moon." At 5:31, Hall took four milligrams of oral dexamethasone and indicated he was still trying to clear his oxygen mask of ice. Talking to Base Camp, he asked repeatedly about the condition of Makalu Gau, I'd already reported with absolute certainty that I'd seen Harris on the South Colat 6:30 P.M May 10. When Hall said that Harris was with him up on the South summit-3,000 feet higher than where I said I'd seen him-most people, thanks to my error, wrongly assumed that Hall's statements were merely the incoherent ramblings of an exhausted, severely hypoxic man.Fischer, Beck Weathers, Yasuko Namba, and his other clients. He seemed most concerned about Andy Harris and kept inquiring about his whereabouts. Cotter says they tried to steer the discussion away from Harris, who in all likelihood was dead, "because we didn't want Rob to have another reason for staying up there. At one point Ed Viesturs jumped on the radio from Camp Two and fibbed, 'Don't worry about Andy; he's down here with us." A little later, Mackenzie asked Rob how Hansen was doing."Doug," Hall replied, "is gone." That was all he said, and it was the last mention he ever made of Hansen.On May 23, when David Breashears and Ed Viesturs reached the summit, they would find no sign of Hansen's body; they did, however, find an ice ax planted about fifty vertical feet above the South Summit, along a very exposed section of ridge where the fixed ropes came to an end.It's quite possible that Hall and/or Harris managed to get Hansen down the ropes to this point, only to have him lose his footing and fall 7,000 feet down the sheer Southwest Face, leaving his ice ax jammed into the ridge where he slipped. But this, too, is merely conjecture.What might have happened to Harris remains even harder to discern.Between Lopsang's testimony, Hall's radio calls, and the fact that another ice ax found on the South Summit was Positively identified as Andy's, we can be reasonably sure he was at the South Summit with Hall on the night of May 10. Beyond that, however, virtually nothing is known about how the young guide met his end.

At 6:00 A.M Cotter asked Hall if the sun had reached him yet."Almost," Rob replied-which was good, because he'd mentioned a moment earlier that he was shaking uncontrollably in the awful cold.In conjunction with his earlier revelation that he was no longer able to walk, this had been very upsetting news to the people listening down below. Nevertheless, it was remarkable that Hall was even alive after Spending a night without shelter or oxygen at 28,700 feet in hurricaneforce winds and windchill of one hundred degrees below zero.During this same radio call, Hall asked after Harris yet again: "Did anyone see Harold last night except meself? " Some three hours later Rob was still obsessing over Andy's whereabouts. At 8:43 A.m. he mused over the radio, "Some of Andy's gear is still here. I thought he must have gone ahead in the nighttime. Listen, can you account for him or not?" Wilton attempted to dodge the question, but Rob persisted in his line of inquiry: "O.K. I mean his ice ax is here and his jacket and things." "Rob," Viesturs replied from Camp Two, "if you can put the jacket on, just use it. Keep going down and worry only about yourself.Everybody else is taking care of other people. just get yourself down.After struggling for four hours to deice his mask, Hall finally got it to work, and by 9:00 A.m. he was breathing supplemental oxygen for the first time; by then he'd spent more than sixteen hours above 28,700 feet without gas. Thousands of feet below, his friends stepped up their efforts to cajole him to start down. "Rob, this is Helen at Base Camp," Wilton importuned, sounding as if she was on the brink of tears, "You think about that little baby of yours. You're going to see its face in a couple of months, so keep on going." Several times Hall announced he was preparing to descend, and at one point we were sure he'd finally left the South Summit. At Camp Four, Lhakpa Chhiri and I shivered in the wind outside the tents, peering up at a tiny speck moving slowly down the upper Southeast Ridge. Convinced that it was Rob, coming down at last, Lhakpa and I slapped each other on the back and cheered him on. But an hour later my optimism was rudely extinguished when I noticed that the speck was still in the same place: it was actually nothing but a rock-just another altitude-induced hallucination. In truth, Rob had never even left the South Summit.Around 9:30 A.M Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri left Camp Four and started climbing toward the South Summit with a thermos of hot tea and two extra canisters of oxygen, intending to rescue Hall. They faced an exceedingly formidable task. As astounding and courageous as Boukreev's rescue of Sandy Pittman and Charlotte Fox had been the night before, it paled in comparison to what the two Sherpas were proposing to do now: Pittman and Fox had been a twenty-minute walk from the tents over relatively flat ground; Hall was 3,000 vertical feet above Camp Four-an exhausting eight- or nine-hour climb in the best of circumstances.And these were surely not the best of circumstances. The wind was blowing in excess of 40 knots. Both Ang Dorje and Lhakpa were cold and wasted from climbing to the summit and back just the day before. If they did somehow manage to reach Hall, moreover, it would be late afternoon before they got there, leaving only one or two hours of daylight in which to begin the even more difficult ordeal of bringing him down. Yet their loyalty to Hall was such that the two men ignored the overwhelming odds and set out toward the South Summit as fast as they could climb.Shortly thereafter, two Sherpas from the Mountain Madness team-Tashi Tshering and Ngawang Sya Kya (a small, trim man, graysing at the temples, who is Lopsang' father)-and one Sherpa from the Taiwanese team headed up to bring down Scott Fischer and Makalu Gau Twelve hundred feet above the South Col the trio of Sherpas found the incapacitated climbers on the ledge where Lopsang had left them. Although they tried to give Fischer oxygen, he was unresponsive. Scott was still breathing, barely, but his eyes were fixed in their sockets, and his teeth were tightly clenched. Concluding that he was beyond hope, they left him on the ledge and started descending with Gau who, after receiving hot tea and oxygen, and with considerable assistance from the three Sherpas, was able to move down to the tents on a short-rope under his own power.The day had started out sunny and clear, but the wind remained fierce, and by late morning the upper mountain was wrapped in thick clouds.

Down at Camp Two the IMAX team reported that the wind over the summit sounded like a squadron of 747s, even from 7,000 feet below.Meanwhile, high on the Southeast Ridge, Ang Dorje and Lhakpa Chhiri pressed on resolutely through the intensifying storm toward Hall. At 3:00 Pm however, still 700 feet below the South Summit, the wind and subzero cold proved to be too much for them, and the Sherpas could go no higher. It was a valiant effort, but it had failed-and as they turned around to descend, Hall's chances for survival. all but vanished.Throughout the day on May 11, his friends and teammates incessantly begged him to make an effort to come down under his own power. Several times Hall announced that he was preparing to descend, only to change his mind and remain immobile at the South Summit. At 3:20 P.M Cotter-who by now had walked over from his own camp beneath Pumori to the Everest Base Camp-scolded over the radio, "Rob, get moving down the ridge." Sounding annoyed, Hall fired back Look, if I thought I could manage the knots on the fixed ropes with me frostbitten hands, I would have gone down six hours ago, pal. just send a couple of the boys up with a big thermos of something hot-then I'll be fine." "Thing is, mate, the lads who went up today encountered some high winds and had to turn around," Cotter replied, trying to convey as delicately as possible that the rescue attempt had been abandoned, "so we think your best shot is to move lower." "I can last another night here if you send up a couple of boys with some Sherpa tea, first thing in the morning, no later than nine-thirty or ten," Rob answered."You're a tough man, Big Guy," said Cotter, his voice quavering."We'll send some boys up to you in the morning." At 6:20 Pm Cotter contacted Hall to tell him that Jan Arnold was on the satellite phone from Christchurch and was waiting to be patched through. "Give me a minute," Rob said. "Me mouth's dry. I want to eat a bit of snow before I talk to her." A little later he came back on and rasped in a Slow, horribly distorted voice, "Hi, my sweetheart.I hope you're tucked up in a nice warm bed. How are you doing? " "I can't tell you how much I'm thinking about you! " Arnold replied."You sound so much better than I expected... Are you warm, my darling?" "In the context of the altitude, the setting, I'm reasonably comfortable," Hall answered, doing his best not to alarm her."How are your feet?" "I haven't taken me boots off to check, but I think I may have a bit of frostbite....."I In looking forward to making you completely better when you come home," said Arnold. "I just know you're going to be rescued.Don't feel that you're alone. I'm sending all my positive energy your way!)) Before signing off, Hall told his wife, "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much." These would be the last words anyone would hear him speak. Attempts to make radio contact with Hall later that night and the next day went unanswered. Twelve days later, when Breashears and Viesturs climbed over the South Summit on their way to the top, they found Hall lying on his right side in a shallow ice hollow, his upper body buried beneath a drift of snow.

No Wonder They Call Me a (Chienne) - by Ann Hodgman (Literary Entry)

This is a required reading assignment for a university literary class. As this work is found in a few places elsewhere online, I have decided to set a precedent for many college students everywhere who so desperately look for a re-posted work online to copy-&-paste to a text-to-speech program. By having it read back to them, they spend a fraction of the effort otherwise spent manually reading this passage. Students seek paths of least resistance. I am constructing one of them.

I’ve always wondered about dog food. Is a Gaines-burger really like a hamburger? Can you fry it? Does dog food “cheese” taste like real cheese? Does Gravy Train actually make gravy in a dog’s bowl, or is that brown liquid just dissolved crumbs? And what exactly are by-products?

Having spent the better part of a week eating dog food, I’m sorry to say that I now know the answers to these questions. While my dachshund, Shortie, watched in agonies of yearning, I gagged my way through can after can of stinky, white-flecked mush and bag after bag of stinky, fat-drenched nuggets. And now I understand exactly why Shortie’s breath is so bad.

Of course, Gaines-burgers are neither mush nor nuggets. They are, rather, a miracle of beauty and packaging—or at least that’s what I thought when I was little. I used to beg my mother to get them for our dogs, but she always said they were too expensive. When I finally bought a box of cheese-flavored Gaines-burgers—after twenty years of longing—I felt deliciously wicked.

“Dogs love real beef,” the back of the box proclaimed proudly. “That’s why Gaines-burgers is the only beef burger for dogs with real beef and no meat by-products!” The copy was accurate: meat by-products did not appear in the list of ingredients. Poultry by-products did, though—right there next to preserved animal fat.

One Purina spokesman told me that poultry by-products consist of necks, intestines, undeveloped eggs and other “carcass remnants,” but not feathers, heads, or feet. When I told him I’d been eating dog food, he said, “Oh, you’re kidding! Oh, no!” (I came to share his alarm when, weeks later, a second Purina spokesman said that Gaines-burgers do contain poultry heads and feet—but not undeveloped eggs.)

Up close, my Gaines-burger didn’t much resemble chopped beef. Rather, it looked—and felt—like a single long, extruded piece of redness that had been chopped into segments and formed into a patty. You could make one at home if you had a Play-Doh Fun Factory.

I turned on the skillet. While I waited for it to heat up I pulled out a shred of cheese-colored material and palpated it. Again, like Play-Doh, it was quite malleable. I made a little cheese bird out of it; then I counted to three and ate the bird.

There was a horrifying rush of cheddar taste, followed immediately by the dull tang of soybean flour—the main ingredient in Gaines-burgers. Next I tried a piece of red extrusion. The main difference between the meat-flavored and cheese-flavored extrusions is one of texture. The “cheese” chews like fresh Play-Doh, whereas the “meat” chews like Play-Doh that’s been sitting out on the rug for a couple of hours.

Frying only turned the Gaines-burger black. There was no melting, no sizzling, no warm meat smells. A cherished childhood illusion was gone. I flipped the patty into the sink, where it immediately began leaking rivulets of red dye.

As alarming as the Gaines-burgers were, their soy meal began to seem like an old friend when the time came to try some canned dog foods. I decided to try the Cycle foods first. When I opened them, I thought about how rarely I use can-openers these days, and I was suddenly visited by a long-forgotten sensation of can-opener distaste. This is the kind of unsavory place can-openers spend their time when you’re not watching! Every time you open a can of, say, Italian plum tomatoes, you infect them with invisible particles of by-product.

I had been expecting to see the usual homogeneous scrapple inside, but each can of Cycle was packed with smooth, round, oily nuggets. As if someone at Gaines had been tipped off that a human would be tasting the stuff, the four Cycles really were different from one another. Cycle-1, for puppies, is wet and soyish. Cycle-2, for adults, glistens nastily with fat, but it’s passably edible—a lot like some canned Swedish meatballs I once got in a Care package at college. Cycle-3, the “lite” one, for fatties, had no specific flavor; it just tasted like dog food. But at least it didn’t make me fat.

Cycle-4, for senior dogs, had the smallest nuggets. Maybe old dogs can’t open their mouths as wide. This kind was far sweeter than the other three Cycles—almost like baked beans. It was also the only one to contain “dried beef digest,” a mysterious substance that the Purina spokesman defined as “enzymes” and my dictionary defined as “the products of digestion.”

Next on the menu was a can of Kal Kan Pedigree with Chunky Chicken. Chunky chicken? There were chunks in the can, certainly—big, purplish-brown chunks. I forked one chunk out (by now I was becoming callous) and found that while it had no discernible chicken flavor, it wasn’t bad except for its texture—like meat loaf with ground-up chicken bones.

In the world of canned dog food, a smooth consistency is a sign of low quality—lots of cereal. A lumpy, frightening, bloody, stringy horror is a sign of high quality—lots of meat. Nowhere in the world of wet dog foods was this demonstrated better than in the fanciest I tried—Kal Kan’s Pedigree Select Dinners. These came not in a can but in a tiny foil packet with a picture of an imperious Yorkie. When I pulled open the container, juice spurted all over my hand, and the first chunk I speared was trailing a long gray vein. I shrieked and went instead for a plain chunk, which I was able to swallow only after taking a break to read some suddenly fascinating office equipment catalogues. Once again, though, it tasted no more alarming than, say, canned hash.

Still, how pleasant it was to turn to dry dog food! Gravy Train was the first I tried, and I’m happy to report that it really does make a “thick, rich, real beef gravy” when you mix it with water. Thick and rich, anyway. Except for a lingering rancid-fat flavor, the gravy wasn’t beefy, but since it tasted primarily like tap water, it wasn’t nauseating either.

My poor dachshund just gets plain old Purina Dog Chow, but Purina also makes a dry food called Butcher’s Blend that comes in Beef, Bacon & Chicken flavor. Here we see dog food’s arcane semiotics at its best: a red triangle with a T stamped into it is supposed to suggest beef; a tan curl, chicken; and a brown S, a piece of bacon. Only dogs understand these messages. But Butcher’s Blend does have an endearing slogan: “Great Meaty Tastes—without bothering the Butcher!” You know, I wanted to buy some meat, but I just couldn’t bring myself to bother the butcher.

Purina O.N.E. (“Optimum Nutritional Effectiveness”) is targeted at people who are unlikely ever to worry about bothering a tradesperson. “We chose chicken as a primary ingredient in Purina O.N.E. for several reasonings [sic],” the long, long essay on the back of the bag announces. Chief among these reasonings, I’d guess, is the fact that chicken appeals to people who are—you know—like us. Although our dogs do nothing but spend eighteen-hour days alone in the apartment, we still want them to be premium dogs. We want them to cut down on red meat, too. We also want dog food that comes in a bag with an attractive design, a subtle typeface, and no kitschy pictures of slobbering golden retrievers.

Besides that, we want a list of the Nutritional Benefits of our dog food—and we get it on O.N.E. One thing I especially like about this list is its constant references to a dog’s “hair coat,” as in “Beef tallow is good for the dog’s skin and hair coat.” (On the other hand, beef tallow merely provides palatability, while the dried beef digest in Cycle provides palatability enhancement.)

I hate to say it, but O.N.E. was pretty palatable. Maybe that’s because it has about 100 percent more fat than, say, Butcher’s Blend. Or maybe I’d been duped by the packaging; that’s been known to happen before.
As with people food, dog snacks taste much better than dog meals. They’re better looking too. Take Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks. The loving-hands-at-home prose describing each flavor is colorful; the writers practically choke on their own exuberance. Of bacon they say, “It’s so good, your dog will think it’s hot off the frying pan.” Of liver: “The only taste your dog wants more than liver—is even more liver!” Of poultry: “All those farm fresh flavors deliciously mixed in one biscuit. Your dog will bark with delight!” And of vegetable: “Gardens of taste! Specially blended to give your dog that vegetable flavor he wants—but can rarely get!”

Well, I may be a sucker, but advertising this emphatic just doesn’t convince me. I lined up all seven flavors of Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks on the floor. Unless my dog’s palate is a lot more sensitive than mine—and considering that she steals dirty diapers out of the trash and eats them, I’m loath to think it is—she doesn’t detect any more difference in the seven flavors than I did when I tried them.

I much preferred Bonz, the hard-baked, bone-shaped snack stuffed with simulated marrow. I liked the bone part, that is; it tasted almost exactly like the cornmeal it was made of. The mock marrow inside was a bit more problematic: in addition to looking like the sludge that collects in the treads of my running shoes, it was bursting with tiny hairs.

I’m sure you have a few dog food questions of your own. To save us time, I’ve answered them in advance.

Q: Are those little cans of Mighty Dog actually branded with the sizzling word BEEF, the way they show in the commercials?

A: You should know by now that that kind of thing never happens.

Q: Does chicken-flavored dog food taste like chicken-flavored cat food?

A: To my surprise, chicken cat food was actually a little better—more chickeny. It tasted like inferior canned pâté.

Q: Was there any dog food that you just couldn’t bring yourself to try?

A: Alas, it was a can of Mighty Dog called Prime Entree with Bone Marrow. The meat was dark, dark brown, and it was surrounded by gelatin that was almost black. I knew I would die if I tasted it, so I put it outside for the raccoons.

"Literary Journalism" - in the textbook "contemporary creative nonfiction: the art of truth" - by Bill Roorbach (Literary Entry)

This is a required reading assignment for a university literary class. As this work is found nowhere else online, I have decided to set a precedent for many college students everywhere who so desperately look for a re-posted work online to copy-&-paste to a text-to-speech program. By having it read back to them, they spend a fraction of the effort otherwise spent manually reading this passage. Students seek paths of least resistance. I am constructing one of them.

The traditional journalist, God bless him, is a "Just the facts, Ma'am" kind of guy. Not for him the squishy-squashy territory of subjective experience, or wishy-washy questions about his objectivity, or longhaired worries over whether his work will last. He sees both sides of every issue, talks to both camps, reports. To the best of his abilities, he writes without bias. All of his stories are other people's stories. His language is always like the next reporter's language, and this is a good thing: we don't need personality on the front page-- we need to know what happened, who what where when how and why, and we want it in the disembodied, generalized, authoritative voice of the newspaper in hand.

Not for our traditional journalist fancy language and ten-dollar words and sentences longer than your leg; he wants all his employer's readers to understand him utterly, from the callow kid in seventh grade to the professor at the local college, from the sisters at the abbey to the regulars at Joe's Bar and Grill. And he wants to offend none of them, but only to inform their opinions. He thinks in column inches and sources, and not in paragraphs and people. He brings the facts to light, and leaves interpretation to others. If his employer and his prejudices and safety let him, he provides one of the crucial services in the preservation of freedom and democracy: the transmission of untainted information. Hail the traditional journalist!

But let's face it, the traditional journalist does not aspire to art. He aspires to the scoop, and to the facts, and to the story of the day, and finds unbounded excellence in his way. His editors, journalists themselves, reserve for themselves and for selected columnists to the right to express opinion. In this expression of opinion, the traditional journalism aspires to influence. But influence is not art, either. On the features page, traditional newspaper does start to tell stories, but they are stories about strangers brought briefly to light, stories that any one of the excellent reporters in the pool of features writers could go out and get and then write competently to the specifications of the features editor.

Literary journalism aspires to art. It may aspire to other things, as well, but artfulness is the crucial ingredient. And art requires an artist, that is, an individual working to her own ends for her own reasons to create something that wasn't there when she started, something no one but the artist knew was necessary until it appeared, something that only the artist could have made in that exact way, or perhaps at all.

The literary journalist may not go around thinking of making art or of being an artist, but in using the language in fresh ways, making characters out of her people (very often including herself), in showing readers the drama of the factual, in having an opinion, in treating her bias as a virtue, in writing for both present and future, in having a very human voice, in presenting her subjects in ways no one else could, in making free use of the conventions of storytelling (dialogue instead of quotation, scene instead of declaration, plot instead of event, point-of-view instead of impartiality, deep involvement instead of professional detachment), she is making literary art at least possible.

Literary journalism is not particularly new, though the label is. Many critics have pointed to George Orwell as a literary journalist, and writers in English well before him like Addison and Steele (Joseph and Richard, respectively), William Hazlitt the elder, James Boswell, and even Robert Louis Stevenson wrote at times in the form before anyone thought to name it, bringing voice and first-person sensibility and unhidden subjectivity (including fierce opinion) and careful language to what was essentially reportage, building a kind of bridge between the essay and the news report.

In the twentieth-century United States, glossy, high-budget magazines gave certain nonfiction writers the benefit of comparatively long and leisurely weekly and monthly deadlines and wider columns for paragraphs to grow in. Audiences got used to reading fiction in these fancy magazines, and come to expect drama and characters and elegant structure and poetry and surprises from the nonfiction, as well. Readers began to respond to writers who told them what it felt like to be a soldier for example, what it felt like to be poor. They wanted the smells, sights, sounds, pains, and caresses, and tastes of life itself, wanted the writing so vivid that as readers they might feel the emotions of the people they read about, and, more and more, feel the emotions and therefore the humanity of the writers themselves.

I include a chapter from John Hersey's Hiroshima here (it's a stretch, I admit, to call it contemporary, though Mr. Hersey is still alive) because Hiroshima is one of the first widely read works of journalism to use the novelist's techniques. Like nearly all the selections I reproduce here, Hiroshima appeared first in a periodical, in this case The New Yorker, whose editor at the time, Harold Ross in 1946, devoted a whole issue to the piece, an unheard-of move. In a letter to the writer, the famously irascible and understated Ross said, "Those fellows who said 'Hiroshima' was the story of the year, etc., underestimated it. It is unquestionably the story of my time, if not of all time. Nor have I heard of anything like it." Of course, humanizing the Japanese victims of the atomic bomb was deeply controversial-- but Hersey's conscience became the world's conscience, and his technique made people of what had been mere front page statistics.

Many critics have pointed out that Truman Capote's In Cold Blood subtitled A true Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences and published in 1965) is only possible because of the pioneering done by Hersey in Hiroshima, not only in technique, but in style and structure. And continuing controversy has surrounded the issue of Capote's accuracy. Did he slip and slide with the facts (especially in the matter of dialogue, and scenes only the dead could remember) in his pursuit of the truth and drama? He called his book a nonfiction novel, causing riots of discussion and argument.

The stage was now set for what Tom Wolfe called the New Journalists, tooting his own rather loud horn while declaring rightly or wrongly that nonfiction writers were taking the literary high ground that novelists had abandoned.

Michael Herr had more to say about war in Vietnam than he'd been able to report back to newspapers-- his work in Dispatches gives the real picture of a journalist's life and work in war emotion and regret included.

Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song, which he subtitled A True Novel, tells the story of Gary Gilmore, the first man executed after the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment, back in the 1970s. Mikal Gilmore gives his own version in Shot in the Heart, published later. Mikal is not only a fine reporter, but Gary's little brother. How does the personal angle figure into the search for the truth in this case?

And all the writers in this section dedicated themselves to the stories they wanted to tell, light-years beyond the limits of traditional journalism, lived inside their stories until they themselves were inextricable from these stories-- that is, only one writer, the artist at the center of the telling, could have done the job at hand.

Readers interested in further immersion in literary journalism shoudl find two excellent volumes helpful indeed: The Literary Journalists, edited by Norman Sims, and The Literature of Reality, edited by Gay Talese and Barbara Lounsberry. And get hold of any one or more of John McPhee's books, all of which are among the best examples of contemporary literary nonfiction available. I've included Mr. McPhee later in this volume-- but if there were unlimited room, I would have included him here, too (and in the essay section, and in the memoir section): he's that important.

Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp - by Joy Williams

This is a required reading assignment for a university literary class. As this work is found nowhere else online, I have decided to set a precedent for many college students everywhere who so desperately look for a re-posted work online to copy-&-paste to a text-to-speech program. By having it read back to them, they spend a fraction of the effort otherwise spent manually reading this passage. Students seek paths of least resistance. I am constructing one of them.

I don't want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately--that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly . . . anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there--some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers--well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out--maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out--such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

Pascal said that it is easier to endure death without thinking about it than to endure the thought of death without dying. This is how you manage to dance the strange dance with that grim partner, nuclear annihilation. When the U.S. Army notified Winston Churchill that the first A-bomb had been detonated in New Mexico, it chose the code phrase BABIES SATISFACTORILY BORN. So you entered the age of irony, and the strange double life you've been leading with the world ever since. Joyce Carol Oates suggests that the reason writers--real writers, one assumes--don't write about Nature is that it lacks a sense of humor and registers no irony. It just doesn't seem to be of the times--these slick, sleek, knowing, objective, indulgent times. And the word environment. Such a bloodless word. A flat-footed word with a shrunken heart. A word increasingly disengaged from its association with the natural world. Urban planners, industrialists, economists, developers use it. It's a lost word, really. A cold word, mechanistic, suited strangely to the coldness generally felt toward Nature. It's their word now. You don't mind giving it up. As for environmentalist, that's one that can really bring on the yawns, for you've tamed and tidied it, neutered it quite nicely. An environmentalist must be calm, rational, reasonable, and willing to compromise; otherwise, you won't listen to him. Still, his beliefs are opinions only, for this is the age of radical subjectivism. Some people might prefer a Just for Feet store to open space, and they shouldn't be castigated for it. All beliefs and desires and needs are pretty much equally valid. The speculator has just as much right to that open space as the swallow, and the consumer has the most rights of all. Experts and computer models, to say nothing of lawsuits, can hold up environmental checks and reform for decades. The Environmental Protection Agency protects us by finding "acceptable levels of harm" from pollutants and then issuing rules allowing industry to pollute to those levels. Any other approach would place limits on economic growth. Limits on economic growth! What a witchy notion! The EPA can't keep abreast of progress and its unintended consequences. They're drowning in science. Whenever they do lumber into action and ban a weed killer, say (and you do love your weed killers--you particularly hate to see the more popular ones singled out), they have to pay all disposal costs and compensate the manufacturers for the market value of the chemicals they still have in stock.

That seems . . . that seems only fair, you say. Financial loss is a serious matter. And think of the farmers when a particular effective herbicide or pesticide is banned. They could be driven right out of business.

Farmers grow way too much stuff anyway. Federal farm policy, which subsidizes overproduction, encourages bigger and bigger farms and fewer and fewer farmers. The largest farms don't produce food at all, they grow feed. One third of the wheat, three quarters of the corn, and almost all of the soybeans are used for feed. You get cheap hamburgers; the agribusiness moguls get immense profits. Subsidized crops are grown with subsidized water created by turning rivers great and small into a plumbing system of dams and irrigation ditches. Rivers have become conduits. Wetlands are increasingly being referred to as filtering systems--things deigned useful because of their ability to absorb urban runoff, oil from roads, et cetera.

We know that. We've known that for years about farmers. We know a lot these days. We're very well informed. If farmers aren't allowed to make a profit by growing surplus crops, they'll have to sell their land to developers, who'll turn all that arable land into office parks. Arable land isn't Nature anyway, and besides, we like those office parks and shopping plazas, with their monster supermarkets open twenty-four hours a day and aisle after aisle after aisle of products. It's fun. Products are fun.

Farmers like their poisons, but ranchers like them even more. There are well-funded federal programs like the Agriculture Department's "Animal Damage Control Unit," which, responding to public discomfort about its agenda, decided recently to change its name to the euphemistic Wildlife Services. Wildlife Services poisons, shoots, and traps thousands of animals each year. Servicing diligently, it kills bobcats, foxes, black bears, mountain lions, rabbits, badgers, countless birds--all to make this great land safe for the string bean and the corn, the sheep and the cow, even though you're not consuming as much cow these days. A burger now and then, but burgers are hardly cows at all, you feel. They're not all our cows, in any case, for some burger matter is imported. There's a bit of Central American burger matter in your bun. Which is contributing to the conversion of tropical rain forest into cow pasture. Even so, you're getting away from meat these days. You're eschewing cow. It's seafood you love, shrimp most of all. And when you love something, it had better watch out, because you have a tendency to love it to death. Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp. It's more common on menus than chicken. In the wilds of Ohio, far, far from watery shores, four out of the six entrees on a menu will be shrimp something-or-other, available, for a modest sum. Everywhere, it's all the shrimp you can eat or all you care to eat, for sometimes you just don't feel like eating all you can. You are intensively harvesting shrimp. Soon there won't be any left, and then you can stop. Shrimpers put out these big nets, and in these nets, for each pound of shrimp, they catch more than ten times that amount of fish, turtles, and dolphins. These, quite the worse for wear, are dumped back in. There is an object called TED (Turtle Excluder Device) that would save thousands of turtles and some dolphins from dying in the net, but shrimpers are loath to use TEDs, as they argue it would cut the size of their shrimp catch.

We've heard about TED, you say.

At Kiawah Island, off the coast of South Carolina, visitors go out on Jeep "safaris" through the part of the island that hasn't been developed yet. ("Wherever you see trees," the guide says, "it's actually a lot.") The visitors (i.e., potential buyers) drive their own Jeeps, and the guide talks to them by radio. Kiawah has nice beaches, and the guide talks about turtles. When he mentions the shrimpers' role in the decline of the turtle, the shrimpers, who share the same frequency, scream at him. Shrimpers and most commercial fishermen (many of them working with drift and gill nets anywhere from six to thirty miles long) think of themselves as an endangered species. A recent newspaper headline said, "SHRIMPERS SPARED ANTI-TURTLE DEVICES." Even so, with the continuing wanton depletion of shrimp beds, they will undoubtedly have to find some other means of employment soon. They might, for instance, become part of that vast throng laboring in the tourist industry.

Tourism has become an industry as destructive as any other. You are no longer benign in traveling somewhere to look at the scenery. You never thought there was much gain in just looking anyway; you've always preferred to use the scenery in some manner. In your desire to get away from what you've got, you've caused there to be no place to get away to. You're just all bumpered up out there. Sewage and dumps have become prime indicators of America's lifestyle. In resort towns in New England and the Adirondacks, measuring the flow into the sewage plants serves as a business barometer. Tourism is a growth industry. You believe in growth. Controlled growth, of course. Controlled exponential growth is what you'd really like to see. You certainly don't want to put a moratorium or a cap on anything. That's illegal, isn't it? Retro you're not. You don't want to go back or anything. Forward. Maybe ask directions later. Growth is desirable as well as being inevitable. Growth is the one thing you seem to be powerless before, so you try to be realistic about it. Growth--it's weird--it's like cancer or something.

As a tourist you have long ago discovered your national parks and are quickly overburdening them. All that spare land, and it belongs to you! It's exotic land too, not looking like all the stuff around it that looks like everything else. You want to take advantage of this land, of course, and use it in every way you can. Thus the managers--or stewards, as they like to be called--have developed wise and multiple-use plans, keeping in mind exploiters' interests (for they have their needs, too), as well as the desires of the backpackers. Thus mining, timbering, and ranching activities take place in the national forest, where the Forest Service maintains a system of logging roads eight times greater than the interstate highway system. Snowmobilers demand that their trails be groomed. The national parks are more of a public playground and are becoming increasingly Europeanized in their look and management. Lots of concessions and motels. Paths paved to accommodate strollers. You deserve a clean bed and a hot meal when you go into the wilderness. At least, your stewards think that you do. You keep your stewards busy. Not only must they cater to your multiple and conflicting desires, they have to manage your wildlife resources. They have managed wildfowl to such an extent that, the reasoning has become, if it weren't for hunters, ducks would disappear. Duck stamps and licensing fees support the whole rickety duck management system. Yes! If it weren't for the people who kill them, wild ducks wouldn't exist! Many a manager believes that better wildlife protection is provided when wildlife is allowed to be shot. Conservation commissions can only oversee hunting when hunting is allowed. But wild creatures are managed in other ways as well. Managers track and tape and tag and band. They relocate, restock, and reintroduce. They cull and control. It's hard to keep it straight. Protect or poison? Extirpate or just mostly eliminate? Sometimes even the stewards get mixed up.

This is the time of machines and models, hands-on management and master plans. Don't you ever wonder as you pass that billboard advertising another MASTER PLANNED COMMUNITY just what master they are actually talking about? Not the Big Master, certainly. Something brought to you by one of the tiny masters, of which there are many. But you like these tiny masters and have even come to expect and require them. In Florida they're well into building a ten-thousand-acre city in the Everglades. It's a megaproject, one of the largest ever in the state. Yes, they must have thought you wanted it. No, what you thought of as the Everglades, the park, is only a little bitty part of the Everglades. Developers have been gnawing at this irreplaceable, strange land for years. It's like they just hate this ancient sea of grass. Maybe you could ask them about this sometime. Every tree and bush and inch of sidewalk in the project has been planned, of course. Nevertheless, because the whole thing will take twenty-five years to complete, the plan is going to be constantly changed. You can understand this. The important thing is that there be a blueprint. You trust a blueprint. The tiny masters know what you like. You like a secure landscape and access to services. You like grass--that is, lawns. The ultimate lawn is the golf course, which you've been told has "some ecological value." You believe this! Not that it really matters--you just like to play golf. These golf courses require a lot of watering. So much that the more inspired of the masters have taken to watering them with effluent, treated effluent, but yours, from all the condos and villas built around the stocked artificial lakes you fancy.

I really don't want to think about sewage, you say, but it sounds like progress.

It is true that the masters are struggling with the problems of your incessant flushing. Cuisine is also one of their concerns. Great advances have been made in sorbets--sorbet intermezzos--in their clubs and fine restaurants. They know what you want. You want A HAVEN FROM THE ORDINARY WORLD. If you're a NATURE LOVER in the West, you want to live in a WILD ANIMAL HABITAT. If you're eastern and consider yourself more hip, you want to live in a new town--a brand-new reconstructed-from-scratch town--in a house of NINETEENTH-CENTURY DESIGN. But in these new towns the masters are building, getting around can be confusing. There is an abundance of curves and an infrequency of through streets. It's the new wilderness without any trees. You can get lost, even with all the "mental bread crumbs" the masters scatter about as visual landmarks--the windmill, the water views, the various groupings of landscape "material." You are lost, you know. But you trust a Realtor will show you the way. There are many more Realtors than tiny masters, and many of them have to make do with less than a loaf--that is, trying to sell stuff that's already been built in an environment already "enhanced" rather than something being planned--but they're everywhere, willing to show you the path. If Dante returned to Hell today, he'd probably be escorted down by a Realtor talking all the while about how it was just another level of Paradise.

How to Write a Personal Essay - by Stanton Michaels

This is a required reading assignment for a university literary class. As this work is found nowhere else online, I have decided to set a precedent for many college students everywhere who so desperately look for a re-posted work online to copy-&-paste to a text-to-speech program. By having it read back to them, they spend a fraction of the effort otherwise spent manually reading this passage. Students seek paths of least resistance. I am constructing one of them.

The easiest way to write a personal essay is to use the standard form taught in Composition 101: an introductory paragraph followed by three paragraphs outlining three main points and a final summary paragraph. But instead of just blathering about yourself, describe vivid scenes and what they mean to you, such as when your 2-year-old son, Jordan, solemnly declares from the bathtub 'I can't swim--my penis is hard' and you tell him it's OK, it's normal, knowing it'll subside and he'll be able to swim soon, but you don't tell him that teeny little weenie he's holding will be the source of the most intense worries, sorrows, and pleasures he'll ever experience, and you wonder if you'll ever be able to tell him the truth. You could follow this thought with the trials and tribulations of your own penis, unless you're a woman--but of course females are involved with love, sex, and life built around their own body parts, which can provide many interesting topics. The key to maintaining reader interest is to be open and honest, displaying your concerns and fears through specific, true-life examples rather than abstract concepts about how you think sex education is important because you learned the hard way on your own and you doubt you'll explain things any better than your own father did. Follow this format and, while you may not become a world-renowned author, you will be able to complete a personal essay.

Use five sentences in each paragraph. Some authors, like Faulkner, write immensely long sentences that drift into nooks and crannies of life, enlightening the reader about how, at age 16, you were tricked by a girl into trying on ring sets from her mom's jewelry-making equipment to find your ring size and later presented with a black onyx and silver ring you were too scared to wear because it implied going steady, which leads to sex, and Dad had just given you and your brother a box of Trojans the week before when Mom and Brooke had gone shopping at Sears for dresses and you were as uncomfortable as Dad when he grunted out his heart-to-heart 'Use these to be safe,' especially since you'd recently calculated and realized he'd knocked Mom up with you when she was 16 and he was out of the army after a four-year hitch and you figured it must have happened by accident since their meeting was accidental, him picking her and her sisters up at a railroad crossing in the rain on Halloween and giving them a ride home, coming later to visit, finally getting down in April without a condom or maybe with one that broke and there you are in December but at least they'd gotten married over the summer and you realize it's April now and you stare at the ring and finally throw it away and tell her later you don't wear jewelry. Tough guys like Hemingway write short, straightforward sentences, such as: 'The author stopped typing. His thick fingers lay bare on the keyboard. Although he's been married for eight years, his ring finger is naked. His wife knows he doesn't wear jewelry. Ever.' Yet other writers like to mix up the lengths of their sentences, using long, compound run-ons that begin with one thought then drive on to others but eventually circle back for completion, then follow with a short, crisp, prissy sentence that would satisfy an eighth-grade grammar teacher. Not me.

Write about things you've done or people you know, introducing your first true love or your first sexual encounter at age 17 crammed in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle with Danielle who will do it for free 'cause she has a crush on you and you need the experience to be ready for your true first time with Julie whom you love and can't get off your mind while you're wedged against the cold side window, remembering Julie's taste, the force of her tongue in your mouth, the way she holds your hard-on like she knows what she wants and you need to be sure how to do it exactly right so here you are pumping away feeling cheap and drunk and ashamed and excited and sore and thinking sex should be a lot more fun or magical than this floundering on the back seat. You can write in sober first person ('I found later with Julie I didn't need the practice session with Danielle'), but some feel this is self-serving and others, such as myself, need the safe distance from slivers of memory provided by humor, misdirection, and second or even third person ('At least he wore a condom both times'). Don't take examples from television or books or newspapers unless they have an effect on you. Don't write about Kurt Cobain's suicide after achieving fatherhood or Jimi and Janis overdosing when you were a teen unless you're a musician--even a part-time folk-rock banjo-picker--wondering how you ever made it out of adolescence since you were so horny yet scared of sex you could only function by smoking a joint first thing in the morning to slow down your thoughts yet still dragged home at midnight after playing a party and jerked off into a dark toilet bowl before passing out in bed worried if you'd wake the next morning and mostly hoping you wouldn't, having all these memories from those horrid nights years ago cascade through your mind when you returned home from a jam session last Wednesday night a little drunk and then--after checking on Jordan and his sister sleeping peacefully--crying for Kurt who'll never know his own child and crying for Jim Morrison and Carla Hill and Randy Batson who died in a car accident in high school and all the others you remember, knowing it was just luck you made it and they didn't, finally wiping away the tears as you piss tequila residue into a murky toilet before going to sleep knowing you're gonna drag tomorrow at work but sure you'll wake up in time as you always do. Write about universal themes you've experienced personally and others can relate to, like love, fear, and death--or sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

Use specific examples that stick to one theme. Don't write generically about how condoms might break when you can write specifically about the first time with Melanie who'd just gotten over an abortion and her new IUD wasn't ready yet so you ran back to your cabin at the summer camp where you were both counselors to get the jet-black, ribbed Love Machine you'd bought in a gas station in North Carolina and carried for two years for just such an occasion but after shredded pieces of black latex dripping with semen fell onto the rumpled sheets and Melanie stared like it was a loaded shotgun pointed right at her belly and all you could do was shrug 'Sorry' and the only worry on your mind was when your next day off was so you could get to town and buy some that worked because this first time with her was what you'd always hoped sex would finally turn out to be--a fun, relaxed sharing of talk, laughter, and touch. Stick to one theme. Don't write about Carla Hill in ninth grade when you were 14 if you're writing about your sex life because she was murdered before anything happened, her throat cut in her own bed during an attempted rape the night before you'd finally mustered up enough courage to ask her to go steady and your buddies had helped you out by sitting in all the seats in the front, right-hand side of the bus where she always sat, leaving the only open space right next to you so she'd just have to sit there and you had your name bracelet all ready but she never got on and everyone else was sobbing, telling you about it. I feel that stories like that, despite being of possible interest, lack relevance to the major themes of 'your sex life' in this essay and should be saved for some other piece of writing--unless, of course, you can tie the story in using a new focus, perhaps discovered while writing the essay, such as maybe realizing your refusal to wear jewelry has nothing to do with your dad, condoms, and pregnancy but is instead related somehow to your first attempt at commitment that went totally sour and you simply compensated in the best way your 14-year-old mind could think of.

Personal essays come in all kinds. Some are forms of reportage, such as those by John McPhee or Tracy Kidder, telling the truths about people they've interviewed yet injecting the honesty of the reporter's perception rather than trying to pretend a writer has no slant that skews a story. Other essays deal with decisions made, such as when you finally decide to make a baby and Cheryl leaves her diaphragm out for the first time in 14 years and you laugh as you remember getting sick of her mom asking about grandkids and telling her you both wanted to get really good at sex before doing it for real and now here you are for real and scared if you'll be good enough, and you're not talking just about sex now. Essays can also be speculative: questions about found objects, thoughts about missed opportunities and things that never were, or memories that haunt you such as Lindsey in Washington, D.C., who lived in an all-women's house that banned men and made you stand outside in the snow when you came over to get some banjo books abandoned by a former tenant but something happened and Lindsey moved into your room the weekend you hitched down to North Carolina as bodyguard and companion to her friend Rose and stayed when you got back to hump you two or three times a night until you got so raw you could hardly walk and with no talk or even real emotion of love or commitment to prevent you leaving a month later, but now you remember how there also wasn't any talk of contraception because you'd assumed she took care of it since she was so much older, yet now you jerk awake in the middle of the night years later with the stark realization that a lesbian has no need of IUDs or diaphragms or the pill but she does need something to make a baby of her own and maybe there's a little Stan Junior walking around someplace who is 6 years older now than you were then and you wonder if he's as naive as you suddenly discover you were (probably still are) and the only minuscule iota of relief you can find is that at least you'll never have to give him that man-to-man about the birds and bees. By baring your life, using concrete situations and honest thoughts, and following the basic rules of grammar and composition, you too can write a personal essay in 25 sentences.