After reading Pete Dexter’s review of Jim Harrison’s new book, The Great Leader, a review where Dexter admits to and feels guilty about writing a 1956 book report on the Bible without having ever read it, I have a confession as well. I just wish I could write it like Pete Dexter, or Jim Harrison, or Rick Bragg, or James Lee Burke.

Like everyone, I had to write a lot of book reports in high school English. Sometimes I read the books; sometimes I did not – mostly not to be honest. I started reading “Moby Dick,” but after “Call me Ishmael,” I found the Cliff notes were better. Same with “The Great Gatsby.” I will not go through the entire list of books I did not read back then. I have repented and read most of them since, but what fun is it to admit to doing something good?

Even though I did not read most of the books I wrote reports about, I did have a system that worked quite well at the time, and if you are in school, do not try this at home.

Libraries are big places filled with books, some of them big and dusty and chewed on the edges by someone’s dog because they forgot to bring it back and left it on the floor. I tried to find books that dogs would not even chew, hoary tales not even my English teacher would have read. And that was the point. When I checked out a book I took it to my teacher and asked if it was any good. If they had read it, they would usually give me a short description. That meant I had to take it back to the library and look for a worse book. I did this until I found a truly terrible, thick book the teacher had never read. Then I did not read it either. I looked at the title, the first few pages, got a general idea right or wrong, and made up my own story, then wrote a report about it.

This may help hone your storytelling skills, but it is not exactly honest. I admit that part now. I am not sorry, however. It’s much harder to make up a story than to just write down what you read, especially when the book sucks to begin with. It worked beautifully through four years of high school and dozens of book reports. It worked in college pretty well too. College professors have their favorite subjects, so just pick something that is not in their bailiwick. Always remember the rule of thumb in college: papers are usually read by grad students who have their own academic fish to fry and would rather be drinking than reading your paper.

The practice caught up with me eventually. When I went back to my ten-year high school reunion one of my old English teachers had taken the time to read one of those books I lied about. She was not happy. She talked to me like I had stolen my education.

I looked at her and thought about apologizing. But then I thought better of it.

“Ma’am, you always said plagiarism was the worst offense a writer could commit,” I said.

“It is,” she said.

“Then I went as far as I could to get away from it,” I said. “What I did is exactly the opposite of plagiarism, wouldn’t you say? I never read those books so I certainly couldn’t steal from them. I’d say you taught me well.”

She squinted and her lip curled and squeezed out an exasperated breath and she walked away and I have not seen her since. Which, I suppose, is the good thing about lying to people you will never meet again.

When you drive past a “Dead End” road sign on your way to the end of a peninsula, things can only get more interesting. Off to the left, in the middle of the ocean, a huge white home sits on a rock island just big enough to fit the foundation, its façade bathed in a stunning, peach sunset.

“That’s one of the seven homes of some CEO,” said a local, greeting us in a wary friendliness exhibited by people who live near water. “Brought it in on a barge and slid it over to the rock. Pretty exciting.”

She said this in a manner that told me she had, indeed, seen more exciting things, but she was being kind to me since I was infatuated by a house on a rock in the middle of the water that she sees every day of her life, just off the coast, just out of reach.

Trees are almost naked on each side of us. Hurricane Irene wrinkled up concrete and docks and decks and roads and first floors of homes all along the coast. The one on the rock, however, looks untouched. The irony is not lost on those who glance at it while cleaning up their middle class messes. Rich people do not just get better tax breaks than the rest of us, they get bigger lives to go with their bigger houses and bigger cars and bigger bank accounts.

I think about that while standing next to the “Dead End” sign, looking at a dead tree lying across a brown and dying yard as the sun goes away and night turns everything to shadows. As if on cue, my smartphone chirps a CNN news blurb: “Apple announces founder Steve Jobs…” I did not need to click the Breaking News app to read the rest of the story.

In the coming dark, with the wind turning into my face, I think about a very rich person who just wanted to do something bigger than making money. And I think he did it.

Some of the best storytellers make their living doing other things, like playing music or writing ads or laying bricks. The best storytellers I’ve known were farmers or drunks or a combination of both.

I met a great storyteller hobo in the 1970’s, but he got on a train and I never saw him again. Bartenders are capable of telling a decent yarn, if they are not too pissed off about their tips. Now and then a preacher can tell a good story too, if he will just stick to the story. I have even seen writers tell pretty good stories, but not too much.

Let me grease up that phrase a little. I do not have an issue with writers. I just have an issue with writers who cannot turn all of those damned words into a story worth reading. And if you have been to Amazon recently, there are a lot of writers cramming sentences between two covers. I say God bless them if they can sell enough books to make a living, which few do. Why? There are just too damned many free storytellers out there, present company excluded.

Ray Wylie Hubbard tells a pretty good “Redneck Mother” story on the stage in that video up there. Some people may not agree. That’s why we have different fast food joints. Not everyone agrees on one. But if you like stories about real people put to a tune, here’s Jerry Jeff Walker telling one of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s tales:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcBOcwgb4OA

On an aside: why country music singers, presidents and serial killers all feel the need to use all three of their given names is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is just part of the story. If Lee Harvey Oswald had bought a guitar instead of a gun, we might all be living in a better place right now. Imagine that story.

Halloween is big business. This year it’s bigger than ever. In a recent survey, over 40 percent of respondents said they will be wearing costumes. Americans plan to spend an average of $66.28 each – or upwards of $20.4 billion. That’s as much as BP agreed to spend to clean up the entire Gulf oil spill. I wonder if there’s a costume of a dead, oil-soaked bird? Probably not.

According to Spirit Halloween.com, some of the most popular costumes are Lady Gaga and the cast of Jersey Shore. Before you rush out to get your fake “The Situation” abs or your “Pauly D” wig, keep in mind that some of these outfits will cost you between $50 and $130. A chicken mascot costume, for instance, is $300. Darth Vader or Halo 3 Master Chief: $700. Damn.

Almost 12 percent of the people from that survey said they put their pet in a costume. I saw a beagle online that could have been Glenn Beck or maybe Drew Cary. Hard to tell.

Halloween has gone from a children’s costumed candy-fest to the biggest national adult party of the year. You want to be Jesus or the Angel of Death to a Nympho Bo Peep? No prob. Just swipe you card. A quick browse around the Web shows everything from a dude dressed as a human baby magnet (with dolls glued all over his body) to a woman dressed like her Facebook page. Then there was the walking Tampon. How drunk do you have to be?

Even entrepreneurial superheroes like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg are out there partying with Yoda and Dracula at the end of the cul-de-sac. Zuckerburg’s costume, by the way, looked a lot like Art Garfunkle minus 45 years.

The latest craze is the “roving Halloween party” where a group of tricked-out adults meet at someone’s house, get drunk, and cruise the neighborhood ringing doorbells. We have several dozen kids hit up our house every year and we keep Rudy upstairs and away from the action because it works him into a snapping frenzy. But if a 45 year-old guy dressed like a condom shows up with a six-foot Tampon in the company of Zuckerberg/Garfunkle, Rudy will get to answer the door, promise. And his costume looks like a pissed-off Jack Russell.

You don’t have to be a Jets fan to like Hard Knocks on HBO. For the entire summer, I have flipped between replayed games on the NFL channel or watched replays of Alabama versus Virginia Tech, or Alabama versus Florida or Alabama versus Texas. I purchased the sports package from Comcast so I can watch every possible college game, many of them in such poor broadcast quality that it feels like 1971 with rabbit ears. I have every version of ESPN hardwired into my carotid artery. Even a special about referees pulled me away from grilling some chicken long enough to burn four birds.

High school football is now on ESPN. I saw three games last weekend. This does not resemble the high school game I played back in the day when I spent most of my time pissing off one of the best coaches in Alabama high school football history. The players on my 55” Samsung last Saturday could have played for the Crimson Tide in the 1970’s. They were that big and fast and strong. I think one of them already had a shoe deal with Nike.

Which brings me to the reason I started writing this post 200 words ago: millionaires playing a game most guys would love to play for free, or did.

Go to B-Dubs on Sunday afternoon and look into the faces of any guy who has just spent two hours sucking down two-dozen Asian Zinged wings chased by 24-oz’s of Bud Light while watching his favorite team get beat. He would pay a month’s salary for the chance to suit up and get beat like that on any pro football field in the world – just for the privilege of saying he did it.

There is no shortage of millionaires playing pro sports. The minimum salary of an NFL benchwarmer is $325,000 a year. Try to pull down that much at the welding supply or plumbing company or climbing electrical poles in a hurricane trying to fix a broken power line. Few guys who own their own successful companies make anywhere near that much. And even fewer have as much fun as the kicker who just missed that 20-yard chip shot. Yet the average family of four will pay over $415 to attend a single NFL game (tickets, parking, food, etc.).

When it is time for kickoff, I still don’t care. I’m right there, spread out in my recliner, remote in hand, watching millionaires hit each other so hard they will look like extras in “Cocoon” by the time they are fifty. If they are honest, every guy in every sports bar in the country would trade his bass boat for just three hours between the sidelines wearing a helmet of his favorite team; and that is how athletes and owners become millionaires in the first place. Guys like me are willing to give them and their teams our hardest earned dollars for just a few minutes of wishing we were them. And sadly, on an orange-leafed autumn day under a porcelain blue sky, it is worth every penny.

What got me to thinking about this was an interview with 70-year-old Robert Duvall for his new movie, Get Low, a true story about a hermit in 1930’s Tennessee who throws his own funeral party while he’s still alive. The funeral party story did not grab me like something else Duvall said: “I did The Godfather at 40.”

I’ve seen The Godfather more times than I want to admit and it never really struck me that Duvall was that old considering The Godfather was the movie most people remember first seeing him (more so than his Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird). So I did a bit of Googling. The list of late bloomers is endless.

Raymond Chandler wrote his first story when he was 45. Stan Lee created Spiderman in his early 40’s. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at 47 and did not get the Nobel prize until 64. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods debuted when she was 65. Einstein was a middle-aged man before anyone listened to his genius. Julia Child was not famous until she turned 49. Danny Aiello did not act until he was 40. Rodney Dangerfield hit it big at 42. Charles Bukowski worked at the post office until his first book was published at 49. No one had ever really heard of Colonel Sanders until he started franchising his famous fried chicken. He was 65. Kurt Warner did not enter the NFL until 28 (ancient for that sport). Henry Miller published his first novel Tropic of Cancer at 44. While a famous actor, to be sure, Clint Eastwood, however, did not direct his first film until he was 41. It goes on and on, so much so that it is difficult to defend the genius of youth syndrome unless you are young. And when youth is gone, Robert Duvall is good fodder for a blog post about the genius of older people.

Then you have Abraham and Sarah of Biblical fame. They were over 75 years old when God spoke to them about having a baby. Considering that Jesus did not really get started until he was over 30 puts things into further perspective as well.

It goes to show there are few rules in life except exceptions. We only notice the famous ones. But as you look around, you’ll see exceptions every day. And many of them are old enough to be your parents.

The fast-growing phenomenon is the creation of 27-year-old Russian software developer, Dmitry Chestnykh, who, ironically, speaks English as a second language. So I entered the word “Irony” 30 times and got the deceased, weird fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft.

The Huffington Post had this to say about the writing analyzer: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/17/i-write-like-website-goes_n_650037.html

It uses keyword recognition to track down your inner author. I spent about 20 minutes analyzing several of my stories. According to “I Write Like,” I write like:

• Stephen King (at least 20 times)
• David Foster Wallace (18 times)
• Kurt Vonegut (12 times)
• Ernest Hemingway (a lot)
• Mario Puzo (4 times)
• Chuck Palachniuk (twice)
• William Gibson (say what?)

I pasted in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil.” I got Ian Fleming.

The Beatles “A Day In the Life” conjured up Raymond Chandler.

Cory Doctorow came up after typing a series of repetitive profanity.

Okay, I spent more than 20 minutes doing this. I spent far too much time. But it is addictive. One hit leads to another and soon you want to analyze everything from Michael Jackson songs to the ingredients on the back of a Pop Tart box. It went on and on. Check it out: http://iwl.me
By the way, I just analyzed this blog post and it is written like Cory Doctorow. You’ll get Cory Doctorow about every 8 tries. Everyone writes like him, I guess. Perhaps his blog: http://boingboing.net is running in the background of our brainwaves as we write other stuff and it comes out about every eighth time. (this single paragraph was analyzed as writing like Cory Doctorow, so there, it’s the eighth paragraph in this post. Point proven.)

Thanks, Jeff (who also writes like Cory Doctorow). Damn. Is Dmitry Chestnykh the president of Doctorow’s fan club?

The recipes in these books are less Emeril than Aunt Emma. From making your own preserves to butchering your own meat to homemade everything, just like great-grandma used to do, these books tell the how’s and why’s of the forgotten skills of cooking. By the way, that’s one of the new book titles out there, “The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. The Time-Honored Ways Are Best: Over 700 Recipes Show You Why.” That’s a mouthful on the cover alone. It was enough words to get a review in the New York Times.

This $40 how-to-and-why textbook from Darina Allen tells how to kill and dress a chicken or made sausage – both skills I skills I practiced during my youth in Alabama, but not from overt chef-ery; we just needed to eat.

In this month’s issue of Oxford American, John T. Edge wrote about Southern community cookbooks.  He focuses on a particular tome called “When People Were Nice and Things Were Pretty – A Culinary History of Merigold, A Mississippi Delta Town.” Damn, another title that would gorge a tribe of hungry librarians.

In the Merigold book, Paula Deen calls cooking a chicken impaled on a beer can: “Beer in the rear.” Edge says the book skews a little white and doesn’t really acknowledge the contribution of African Americans and Native Americans in Southern Cuisine. And in my opinion, there would be no Southern Cuisine without those two groups.

Mr. Edge goes on to say that Africans brought us deep frying, honed the art of sweet potatoes and I’m pretty sure that greens and everything else I like to eat was not concocted by white women slaving in their kitchens, but by black women literally slaving in white people’s kitchens.

After reading about antique cooking methods, eating in the South is pretty simple: take away Soul Food and all you have left is empty cast iron skillets.

Now comes Floyd Landis, a past teammate and friend who alleges all of the above and more – and admits to doing it all himself as well. The difference between those same old yearly allegations and the ones Landis is hurling now is the heat that accompanies legal attention by the FDA’s criminal division. Landis is cooperating with the Feds in an investigation headed by Jeff Novitzy who ran the BALCO case.

Novitzy has chased athletes like Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. Steroid allegations stuck to Bonds and Clemens. Jones went to jail for bank fraud. Novitzy, playing the role of a Elliot Ness, wants to know if controlled substances were paid for by the $10 million or so doled out to the United States Postal Service sponsorship of Armstrong’s cycling team (which was owned by Armstrong and Tailwind Sports).

In a text message to a friend, Landis said flat out: “Big Tex is going to jail.” I would think it is safe to say that Armstrong has un-friended Landis on Facebook.

Stories like this are why I love sports. It provides so much more than the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Sports combines more back-stabbing high drama, comedy, thievery, cheating, sex scandals, drug dealing, injuries and murder than anything on prime time, or DVD or in movie theaters. It gives us heroes and villains, saints and assholes, all practicing good, evil and every smelly, sordid nasty bit in between. Sports shows us at our best as human beings and at our worst as scum of the earth, all at the same time and sometimes in the same game. And, there’s $10 hotdogs, $9 beer and big screens as big at my house.

When was the last time you saw someone shave a logo into their chest hair, paint themselves a team color and act like an escapee from a mental institution, and pay $375 for a plastic seat to do it on national TV? You can see it every damned night. Sports started a long time ago in Greece and never ends. It’s 24-7, 8 days a week, with skimpily-dressed girls, feeble, rich owners, thick-necked pontificators and has-been commentators. These announcers invent more words and butcher the English language worse than I do. And we love every minute of it.

After reading about Lance Armstrong and these recent allegations, all I could think of was how I loved to ride my bike as a kid. I rode that cheap chunk of Sears metal 9 hours a day in the summer, rain or shine and until I froze to the handlebars in winter. I could jump ramps and do tricks and pop wheelies and snap a 360º on the front tire with my ass in the wind like a sail. I loved riding that bike. And no one paid me one nickel to do it. I did it for free. That’s where I was stupid.

If I could have gotten some blood transfusions and drugs to help me ride harder, faster and longer, perhaps I could have had twice the fun and become a millionaire. But at the end of the day, we’re talking about guys who ride bicycles, for god’s sake. Bicycles!

I’m not saying Lance Armstrong took drugs or sucked his own blood. I have no idea. He has been Superman for years and I would hate to think that he is really more like Iron Man instead – flying with a little help from his friends. But if you have to cheat to win a damned bicycle race, you best be getting into NASCAR and at least have 800 horsepower under the pedal to jack up your competition.