Why I am not an evil overlord

Do you KNOW how much paper work is involved with being an evil overlord? Say you want to poison the drinking water of a major industrial city. Can you just dump a truck load of dioxin in the reservoir? No way. You’ve got to file 42 pounds of paperwork with the Environmental Destruction Agency. It doesn’t matter what you want to do – incinerate a city, cause a million virgins to be raped by crazed mutant petri-dogs, whatever – there’s always 42 pounds of goddamn paperwork to be filed.

I discover to my surprise that I am a (about to be) published poet. It seems that a literary group at the U. of South Dakota posted a call for submissions in rec.arts.books, a usenet news group that I follow. Since SD is my home state I was inspired to send them a few poems, more or less as a bit of randomness on my part. Said submissions disappeared into the maw of nothingness and I forgot about them. Quite recently I was notified that one of the poems had been accepted and will duly appear in the 1999 Vermillion Literary Project. La di da.

It should be understood that this is not a financially remunerative operation. Payment consists of a contributors copy which is no more than I offered to contributors to sundry fanzines that I have edited. I could make various sardonic comments but this is the equivalent of being awarded a gold star and it behooves me to treat it with respect. I shall paste my gold star on my forehead and wear it with pride for a day.

In truth I am already a published poet. (We do not count self published poetry.) When I was a youngster I wrote a series of poems, veritable doggerel, starring “Brother Sid and Me”. My mother fired these off to an organic farming magazine which she subscribed to and they printed them. I have no copies of them so I have no notion of what my first published poetry looks like. I suspect that that is just as well.

I have discovered to my displeasure that I have trashed the August 1998 editorial entitled Purple Dresses. I will leave the link there in case I ever find it. In the meantime I shall take succor in the maxim that every web site needs some broken links.

Things best left unmentioned are best left unmentioned so I won’t mention them. I will say, however, that ye olde site may not get much attention from yours truly in the next few months. What with one thing and another I may be moving and doing other things that impact the time spent on maintaining my offering to the wisdom of the ages. We shall see.