POP-A-LOOZA: Personal Questions

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is a good-naturedly silly little trifle called "Personal Questions."

My first-ever successes as a writer were humor pieces for my high school literary magazine The NorthCaster circa 1975 or '76. What they lacked in sophistication they...well, maybe they lacked everything. But some of my classmates thought they were funny, and that meager success, that connection with an audience, led to more. A series called The Maltese Padlock was a deadpan Dragnet parody told in the first person by its trigger-happy protagonist Mayday. I may dig those out and preserve them here someday. The only NorthCaster humor I've ever put on the blog were a couple of rejected, previously-unpublished  emeritus contributions I did when I was a freshman in college: "NorthCaster Reviews" and a NorthCaster commercial. None of this is exactly Swift, nor even Henny Youngman. But it was me at 17.

Decades later, my first-ever fiction sale was a comedy short story called "Guitars Vs. Rayguns," written and sold in 2019, published in Billionaire Island # 5 in 2020. I have not yet made that story available anywhere outside of its officially published appearance, but you can read the circumstances of its creation here. You can also see the This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio playlist it inspired, and then see one reader's enthusiastic reaction to the story here.

I don't write very many humor pieces nowadays. The reason why not is very simple: 'cuz. One well-received exception was 2017's "I WAS THERE! A First-Person Account Of The Bowling Green Massacre." I've written a few others here and there, including "Conversation Stoppers," "WITCH HUNT!," and "Florida Man Follies." Otherwise, well, I guess I'm just a serious guy by nature.

For a more straightforward parallel to "Personal Questions," I direct you to "The Everlasting First: Sidebar Edition, Part 1" and "The Everlasting First: Sidebar Edition, Part 2." But for a smirk, I offer "Personal Questions" as the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.

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