The other night while watching the UNC-NC State game, I opened up the internet and started typing here about college basketball. I did this a lot last year, but haven’t been doing it too much this year because my team isn’t doing so hot. In the post, I mentioned the big game that is coming up between Memphis and Tennessee tonight. The next day checking the website stats I noticed that I got more hits on my website in 24 hours than I had for any month since it has been in existence. Twelve hundred people came from a link on some Tennessee Vols fan website. Two things: I called Memphis coach John Calipari “Steve Calipari.” And, two, not as embarrassingly, I predicted, without having seen either team play more than ten minutes, that Memphis would win the game by 14 or so points. Next thing I know 1200 people are reading my site. Great.
But feeling like a smacked ass didn’t end there. A few months ago I got an email from a friend telling me that he could get me into my alma mater’s alumni magazine since he recently got assigned to be our year’s class notes person. So I started telling him all about how my wife and I had begun harvesting children and so forth, and then I thought it might have been funny to add that the novel I had written had recently been rejected by none other than a very well known writer’s agent. The joke was meant to work on a prestige/failure axis, but it kind of falls flat without the “none other than” which is a phrase, to my self-deprecating mind at least, connoting humor as much as it does superlative singularity, if that makes any sense (as if I should care any more at this point). Were it up to me, and had I not emailed my classmate after I probably had a few beers, and maybe was describing this aspect of my life in joking form, I think I would have done something as follows:
Mr. Prior also proudly reported that the novel he has written, THE YOKE OF THE HORDE, has recently been rejected by some of the most highly regarded literary agents in the world.
Instead, I got, “His novel was rejected by XXXXX’s agent.”
Say what?
On second thought, maybe my failure at this game is funny to nobody but myself, and maybe I should be ashamed in the proper fashion, i.e. by keeping my fat mouth shut and burning my books when they eventually get to my door. It’s my own damn fault for not being more explicit with my intentions, but it really burns me up because I look so stupid in front of god knows how many people.
1200 + x.