One day, one of the kids is going to read this. It’s a joke! We mean you no ill will! Ha ha. Kids are hilarious. And they taste like chicken. Joking! Ha ha! Modest proposals aside, there’s a flash fiction I wrote a couple years back on a related subject, which I think I figured out how to turn into a 1 or 2 panel comic. That will be for tomorrow, since it took me until 11 p.m. to even have an idea. And then, of course, I had 2.

Anyway, cannibalism is always hilarious. It was the topic of my senior thesis in college. Chew on that. Or don’t. I’m not sure why that subject sang to me, but it didn’t sing that loudly. I just had to pick something to graduate, and the truth was that I was graduating in the wrong major, and had therefore come to the end of my undergraduate education with very little interest in the field they wanted me to write about, which was psychology.

The topic my advisor had originally suggested I do was “a cultural history of LSD.” No joke. I went to a rather unusual school. I didn’t take her suggestion because it seemed like a really exhaustive subject, to which I felt unqualified to do justice. I wasn’t interested in doing that much work. Not that kind of work. I read a minimal number of books about cannibalism in different forms and struggled to bang out 30 pages at the end of a semester in which I didn’t even take any other classes.

Compared to my master’s thesis, which I worked on throughout my entire 3 years in grad school, and was 600 pages.

Neither of them were great works, but the cannibalism thing was embarrassingly bad. Unfocused and produced almost entirely without guidance. My MFA project was flawed, but full of good pieces too. Mostly because my heart was in it. I feel like I have to throw my heart like that into everything, but I don’t always succeed. Still, my track record improves.