AMC is showing all the Friday the 13th movies today. I don’t think I’ll ever watch a Friday the 13th movie without thinking about Jeff Martin. Jeff and I met in 7th grade, which means we had only been friends for a couple of months when he invited me to his Halloween party. I’m not 100% positive, but I think that was the first time I went to his house. It was a costume party, and I arrived wearing a werewolf mask with a flannel shirt and blue jeans. One good thing about being a werewolf is you can wear… (read more)

We’ve spent our past two Creative Nonfiction class periods interviewing fellow classmates. I’ve interviewed a lot of people over the past 25 years. I cut my teeth doing interviews for my college newspaper, before doing intern stints with both the El Reno Light and the El Reno Tribune. Most of those interviews went horrible. Typically I showed up with a set list of questions (that I refused to deviate from), asked them, and left. The first really good interview I did was for the El Reno Tribune. The city was relocating a historical home, and the newspaper asked me to… (read more)

My dad recently got rid of the shed in his backyard. It was uncharacteristically non-emotional for me. I have nostalgic connections with many things from my childhood, but apparently they do not extend to thirty-year-old wooden storage buildings. If you ever want to watch human ingenuity at its finest, find something seemingly impossible to move and then advertise it for free on Craigslist. My friend did this once after purchasing a home that “came with” a less-than-new pool table in the basement. After scratching his head for a week, he advertised the pool table for free on Craigslist with that… (read more)

I recently read that most adult males keep pairs of underwear for, on average, seven years. When I look at the underwear in my drawers it’s hard to remember how long I’ve owned them. Unlike larger purchases like houses and cars, I don’t think most people — or at least I don’t — have a good frame of reference as to when any particular pair was purchased. They don’t change models each year. I didn’t keep the receipt. I’m pretty sure all the underwear I currently own I also owned in our previous house. Some of them I owned in… (read more)

In high school, Jeff was my only classmate who knew how to solder. What little I know today about soldering I learned from looking over his shoulder, and talking to my dad, who used to do electronic repair in the Air Force. I cut my soldering teeth while attaching modchips to PlayStations back in the late 90s. The earliest modchips only required four wires to be soldered to the console’s motherboard, and the contact points were large and isolated from other components. I can’t imagine anything easier to work on. By the time the PlayStation 2 was released, modchips required… (read more)