Last May, when I sat down to write the fifty-second weekly installment of “Up at the Creek,” I reflected on my first year as an op-ed columnist. I tried to claim that the year-end review was about improving the work, but looking back on the piece, I seem to have been a lot more interested in celebrating the milestone than in Chinese-style “self-criticism.” I’d like to try to do a little better this time.
Another year has passed, and with it, another fifty-two columns. Rereading a year’s worth of columns all at once is a strange experience, a reminder of what struck me, week in and week out, as worthy of 800 hard-fought words, but also of the larger themes that shape my interests and guide my curiosity, often without my even realizing it.
For instance: bugs.
I wrote a lot about bugs in Year One. The relentless siege continued in Year Two, which found me beset by mosquitoes, sweat bees, hornets, and head lice.
The year’s bites, stings, and utterly revolting hair infestations certainly added up to a lot of misery. But they also led to some interesting research into why our bodies are designed to itch; how our instinct for language might operate on the same level as the spider’s instinct to build its web; and how it’s generally a bad idea to criticize your daughter’s messy room in the pages of a newspaper. Because even if she doesn’t tend to read your columns, her grandparents do.
Another big theme of the year was Greece. In December, without much irony at all, I invoked Socrates and the birth of democracy to describe NBC’s “The Sing-Off.” Just a few weeks later, in a cheerful Christmas piece, I proposed the Trojan horse, full of crafty, murderous Greeks, as a prime example of a really bad gift. In January, perhaps in retaliation, my website was attacked by an evil Greek spambot, which led to the extreme step – no doubt a crushing blow to my many Greek admirers – of blocking that entire nation from emailing me. In February, I retold the sad story of Tithonus from Greek myth, who won eternal life, only to spend it in the world’s first nursing home in an eternally shriveling mortal body.
Why all the Greeks? Again, like the bugs, something to keep an eye on.
Now that I’m a bona fide member of the op-ed Century Club, I don’t mind turning an eye on one of the year’s clunkers, a piece that was meant to be a satirical assault on some garden-variety vandals. As in, the drunken idiots who were, at the time, targeting innocent solar-powered garden lights. This was back in July. Some of you might have been puzzled by a column that seemed to be quoting representatives of the FBI, Interpol, and at least one Russian gangster, interviewed in his cell at Prison Colony No. 7 in Novgorod Province.
A global conspiracy to steal solar-powered garden lights? In order to create black-market iPod chargers?
Really?
Well, my intentions were good. The point was to write a column that hurled a steady stream of insults at the (moronic) real-life vandals; the point was not to mislead the trusting public.
Not all of the pieces this year were light-hearted. The big national news story of the summer was the BP oil spill, which led me to contrast the triumph of the Apollo 13 rescue with the fiasco that was unfolding in such agonizing slow motion a mile under the Gulf of Mexico.
The year also saw the arrival of “Wikileaks” as a major player on the world stage, which struck me, on balance, as bad news for international relations.
But there were also plenty of developments right here in Perry County. I wrote about gerrymandering in the 9th and 17th Congressional Districts; a proposed roundabout at Sterretts Gap; the official restoration of the “s” to our beloved “Shermans Creek;” the near loss of funding for streamgauges in the Susquehanna River Basin; and the auctioning of our dear neighbor’s property, the last sad chapter in his untimely death to gun violence.
I also wrote about the history of the county, as embodied in the narratives of Indian captivity that were so popular at the beginning of the 19th century. In researching those stories, I was reminded anew that this side of Blue Mountain was once the western reach of our fledgling country.
I’d like to think we’re still pioneers. I certainly feel like one. The question is: of what frontier?
Here’s to Year Three, with your kind indulgence, and to another fifty-two weeks of restless exploration!
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 05 May 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
