Okay, I have to come clean somewhere, so you just got voted my confessor. Lucky you.

So Laura and I started playing Wednesday nights in a pub trivia league late last spring. It's a uniform game that takes place in different bars not just all over Chicago but in several cities around the country. Our first few outings were dismal, but gradually we improved to the point where we took several firsts at our home bar, and we regularly place near the top of the pack. During this past season, our team—then known as The Reigning Cats and Dogs—did well enough to get invited to the city league championship match on February 13th. We placed 15th out of about 25 teams.

Using cell phones to look up answers is strictly forbidden, and we never cheat on that score. Sometimes, though, if we're nervous about a question, we'll look up the answer after we've already turned in our response. We're there to have fun, but we also love winning, and we can get pretty competitive with the other regular teams. It's a friendly competition, though.

Besides Laura and me, we have a few regulars on the team, most consistently Diane and Chuck. On a normal night, we have three or four players. There is no real limit on team size, though. We've had as many as six and as few as two. Everyone has categories they're strong and weak in. Laura does great at business and advertising and celebrity questions. Diane has TV and politics. I'm good at music and science and geography. Chuck has history, and he's pretty good at sports too. We generally dread sports questions, though, and there are usually a lot of them, so we recently recruited a new player, Randy, to help shore up that weak area.

Also, we have a regular waitress at the bar who's taken a liking to our team. I'll call her Devin. She likes to get in on the act too, so sometimes when we're stuck on a question she'll drop by, under cover of taking our beer order, and brainstorm with us on the answer. She has saved our bacon on more than one occasion.

Last Wednesday night, for the first time, I was the only team member able to attend. I considered blowing it off, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a few beers, and playing alone sounded like an epic challenge. For the new season we've changed our team name to Question Authority, but as long as our assigned league number is on our answer slips, we can call ourselves whatever we like on any given evening, so that night I called my team of one the Lone Punman. Nervously, and not without a great deal of self-consciousness, I settled in at our regular table to wait for the game to start.

I usually send a few Twitter updates from the matches, and much has been made there and on Facebook about my performance that evening. But I'm here to semi-publicly confess something that my teammates already know—I'm not as amazing as I've led people to think I am. Here is a detailed recap of the evening's match, from my perspective, that I wrote up the next day for my fellow Question Authorities.

(I've inserted some annotations along the way on how gameplay proceeds.)

[Our trivia game is played in six rounds of three questions each. At the start of each round, the quizmaster announces the three categories that will be used. Teams have three different point values they can assign to the questions in the round—5, 3 and 1. Each can only be used once. For example, if a team uses their 5-point value for the first question, they have 3 points and 1 point left to use on the two remaining questions. The quizmaster reads each question, then plays a four-minute song. Teams write their answers down on slips of paper, together with their point value, team name and league number, and turn their slips in to the quizmaster before the end of the song. Questions start easy and get harder as the round proceed. In addition, the answer to one question for the night, but not the question itself, has been revealed that day on the league's web site—if you've played before and know to look.]

ROUND 1
American History
Classic TV
Music Lineup

1. What was first recited in unison by American schoolchildren on October 11, 1892?

2. On the television series "Green Acres," what big city did Oliver and Lisa Douglas leave to move to the old Haney place?

3. Which of the following Gibb brothers was not a member of the Bee Gees? Is it Andy, Barry, Robin or Maurice?

ROUND 2
Money
Opera
U.S. Geography

1. The back of what U.S. state's commemorative quarter features an ear of corn, a wheel of cheese, and a cow?

2. What insect appears in the title of a popular opera by Giacomo Puccini?

3. The Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan all border what U.S. state?

ROUND 3
The Olympics
Business
Music

1. What was the last U.S. city to host the Winter Olympics?

2. What international restaurant chain's slogan is "Love all, serve all"?

3. What alternative rock band's forthcoming album Teargarden by Kaleidoscope will consist of 44 tracks released one at a time as digital downloads? Is it Coldplay, My Chemical Romance, Smashing Pumpkins or the White Stripes?

[The halftime bonus round, also known as the "shots round," consists of one four-part question. A correct answer for each part is worth 2 points, for a total of up to 8 points. The team with the most points on the halftime bonus question is awarded a round of free shots, courtesy of Freddy. Teams have the length of two songs to turn in their answers.]

HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION
Geography

For each of the following, name the island nation by its capital city:

• Manila
• Reykjavik
• Santo Domingo
• Suva

[In the case of a tie for first place on the bonus question, one representative from each contending team is sent to the front of the room with an answer slip and a pencil. The tiebreaker question has a numerical answer. The team to come closest to the actual value wins the free shots.]

HALFTIME BONUS QUESTION TIE-BREAKER
Theme Parks

In what year did the Black Widow roller coaster make its debut at Six Flags New England?

[Going into the second half of play, the quizmaster reports the current standings.]

SCORES AT THE HALF
8th - 29 points - Flavor Stripe
7th - 31 points - Dangling Participles
5th - 32 points - Succotash My Balzac, Pound Puppies
3rd - 34 points - DB(?), LeVar Burton Love Explosion
1st - 35 points - Old Song, Lone Punman

[In the second half, the available point values for each round of questions increase to 6, 4 and 2 points.]

ROUND 4
Actors
Movie Plots
Nicknames

1. Who is the only actor from any television series in the Star Trek franchise to have been knighted?

2. What Clint Eastwood movie was loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killings?

3. What nickname is shared by both billiards champion Jeanette Lee and competitive eater Sonya Thomas?

ROUND 5
Shakespeare
Vocabulary
Science Fiction

1. What is the name of the king that Macbeth killed?

2. What word for a solution of water and salt can be applied to seawater or the liquid in a jar of pickles?

3. What 1979 sci-fi/horror movie featured a spaceship called the Nostromo?

ROUND 6
Cars
Baseball
Mythology

1. In 2007, what international car maker became the first company to sell a million vehicles in one year in China?

2. What is the only current National League team to never win a pennant or NLCS?

3. In Greek mythology, what kind of creature was Polyphemus?

[At the end of regular play, the quizmaster reports the current standings again.]

SCORES AT THE END OF REGULAR PLAY
8th - 49 points - Dangling Participles
6th - 60 points - DB(?), Succotash My Balzac
5th - 61 points - Flavor Stripe
4th - 62 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion
3rd - 63 points - Old Song
2nd - 66 points - Pound Puppies
1st - 69 points - Lone Punman

[Teams are allowed to wager anywhere from 0 to 15 points on the final question. If they turn in a correct answer, the point wager is added to their score. But if they turn in an incorrect answer, that wager is deducted from their score.]

FINAL QUESTION Games

Place the following in order from greatest to least:

• Number of pawns a player starts with in chess.
• Highest possible value of a hand in baccarat.
• Number of $20 bills a player starts with in Monopoly.
• Numerical value assigned to the left fielder position in baseball stats.

The song ends. Hank prolongs the agony with thanks and so forth before slowly reading off the right answers in order. My first answer is right. My second answer is right. My knuckles are white. Third answer is right! Cheers start going up all around the room, but it doesn't matter. With the wager I made, no one can touch me. I slump back in my seat. It's over. I'm a rock star. I'm a legend.

FINAL SCORES
8th - 45 points - DB(?) (was tied for 6th, down 15 points)
7th - 46 points - Flavor Stripe (was 5th, down 15 points)
6th - 48 points - Old Song (was 3rd, down 15 points)
5th - 60 points - LeVar Burton Love Explosion (was 4th, down 2 points)
4th - 64 points - Dangling Participles (was 8th, up 15 points)
3rd - 75 points - Succotash My Balzac (was tied for 6th, up 15 points)
2nd - 81 points - Pound Puppies (place unchanged, up 15 points)
1st - 82 points - Lone Punman (place unchanged, up 13 points)

Well, tomorrow it will be, anyway. Last Wednesday night was awesome. I don't regret a bit of it.

I read the following essay, which appears in somewhat different form in the epilogue to The Accidental Terrorist, in the Essay Fiesta series at The Book Cellar in Chicago, on December 21, 2009.

There is no worse feeling than, five minutes after some unpleasant confrontation has left you tongue-tied, humiliated and confused, smacking yourself on the forehead and exclaiming, "Oh, my God! That's what I should have said!"

This is not that kind of a story. This is the story of how I once delivered the perfect rejoinder, in the moment, when it counted. I tell it not to demonstrate how smart, suave, or clever I am, but because it so rarely happens that way with me. In fact, this may be the only story of its kind I have.

This happened in December 2003, at a Christmas party my wife Laura and I threw at our apartment in Queens, New York. Our parties, if I do say so, were legendary, always with an interesting mix of people, and always with good booze, and plenty of it.

Among the many invitees were my old, old friend Katrina and her new husband Bernard. Katrina and I had gone to high school together in Utah, dated seriously for a while afterward, and stayed in touch over the intervening years. Bernard was Dutch, and nine years her junior. They met in graduate school at the University of Fairbanks, where Katrina finished a master's degree in microbiology. They had just moved to Connecticut and taken jobs with a big pharmaceutical company. Our Christmas party was my first time meeting Bernard. He struck me as a nice enough fellow when I took his coat and hat at the door, if a little reticent. I put it down to the nerves you get at a party where you don't know anyone.

But an hour of sampling our beverage offerings loosened Bernard's tongue considerably. Did I say "sampling" our offerings? A better word might have been "plundering."

I was talking with a small group of friends in a corner of the kitchen when the young Dutchman—a newly minted doctor of chemical engineering—came sauntering over and inserted himself in the conversation. In a slurred accent, he said, "You know what I just found out that I did not know before? I found out in the car on the way down here. This guy here"—he indicated me with the wineglass in his hand—"he used to be engaged to my wife."

I looked around the small group I'd been chatting with. It included my long-time friend Bob, and also my friend Elizabeth, who is blind.

"Well, this is awkward," I said.

"Yeah," Bernard went on, "he like got engaged to her at some airport."

This was true. It was the Salt Lake International Airport, seventeen years earlier. I was about to get on a plane and leave for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. Katrina and I had only been dating for a few weeks at the time, but we had fallen desperately in love—as people often do when an attraction manifests and the time to act on it is short. I wanted her to wait for me while I was away saving souls in the wilds of . . . Canada, and she had been dropping big hints that a certain question might serve to seal that deal.

I didn't like the intent look on Bernard's face, nor his belligerent tone. I hadn't been in a fight since junior high (Jason Peterson), but I really didn't want Elizabeth caught in the middle if things were about to turn violent. I tried to play it casual.

"That was a really long time ago," I said. "We were kids. I was nineteen."

"Yeah," said Bernard, "and my wife was twenty."

"Time to change the subject, Bill," said Bob, who among other jobs had worked as a merchant seaman. "You're only digging a deeper hole."

"Can you believe this?" Bernard said to the group at large, spreading his arms and sloshing some of his wine on the floor. "I only just found out. That's a pretty big thing."

I suffer, I'm afraid, from the delusion that reason and calm words can actually make a difference in the world. "Not really, it's not," I said in an offhand tone. "It didn't mean anything. To Mormons, getting engaged is like a pastime. It's a sport, it's just what you do. It's not the same as for other people."

This, also, was true. Mormons so heavily stress finding a mate and getting married that women are considered old maids at 21. But by the same token, engagements made under that intense pressure can also be rather fragile. I myself was engaged no less than five more times before it finally took, which didn't even match my father's record of seven engagements, one marriage.

Of course, by the time I did get married, I had long abandoned the LDS faith, as you might have deduced from the copious alcohol at our Christmas party. Which had somehow gotten me into this tense and uncomfortable conversation.

Bernard was undaunted by my footnotes to his pronouncements. Unfazed, he addressed the group at large, unsteady on his feet. "You know what else I found out? There was something about a ring, this ring—made out of wrapping paper?"

I looked around the group again. "Foil," I said. "It was the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum."

I was nineteen, had never lived away from home, and was about to embark on a two-year experiment in poverty. No way I could afford a real ring. So when I got down on one knee in front of Katrina in that airport departure lounge, I pulled out a foil gum wrapper folded twice lengthwise, wrapped it around her ring finger to size it, tore off the excess length, and fastened the ends together with a piece of Scotch tape I had stuck to the ATM card in my wallet. Voila! Instant engagement ring.

Of course, it was worth about as much as I'd paid for the gum. I came home two years later only to have Katrina tell me that she'd met someone else while I was away. (That ended up being her first husband, whom I'll call . . . Jerkface.)

"Yeah, yeah, that was it," said Bernard, wagging a finger at me. "A gum wrapper. And you know what else?" He leaned in close enough for me to gag on his breath, but without lowering his voice any. "She still has it. She still has that ring."

I was stunned, completely stunned, but I tried not to let it show as I delivered my verbal judo flip, my coup de grâce.

"That's nothing, Bernard," I said, patting him on the shoulder. "I still have the gum."

For a second there, Bernard looked like he believed me. Then everyone laughed good-naturedly, and he did too. The situation was defused. Bernard wandered peacefully away in search of other entertainment.

"You really dodged a bullet there, pal," Bob told me.

As I watched poor Bernard drift around the party showing people his stomach tattoo, I realized that I probably had. Back in 1988, that is, when Katrina broke up with me.

Last April I wrote the first draft of a story called "Care and Feeding of Your Piano." It's a short, humorous piece written entirely as excerpts from the interactive instruction manual for a bioengineered piano*.

Armed with some suggestions from my writing group, I sat in my Baltimore-area hotel room a month and a half later and spent two hours applying some heavy revisions to the sucker, which including reordering many chunks of text to achieve more comic juxtapositions. I sync'd the laptop with the USB memory stick I always carried as backup—at least, I presume I did, because that had long been my habit—then rushed over to Balticon for my scheduled reading. I read that story and one called "Timesink" (which was then and is still forthcoming in Electric Velocipede) directly from my computer screen. The reading seemed to go over pretty well, at least according to Jamie Rubin, who was there.

In June, as I prepared to attend the Blue Heaven workshop, I got frustrated with all the cruft slowing down my laptop, so I wiped it and reinstalled Windows XP. At the end of that month, we moved to Chicago. As we unpacked, I became more and more uneasy the longer my black Manhattan Portage shoulder bag, which I was looking for, failed to turn up. I always carried my USB memory stick in a little Velcro'd pocket on the front of it. The shoulder bag has never turned up, one of the very few casualties of our move.

It wasn't until we'd been here a month or more that I went to the desktop machine to take another look at my revised version of "Care and Feeding." I was going to give it a quick polish-and-trim and get it out there—first stop, New Yorker "Shouts & Murmurs" submission. (Why not, right?)

But what appeared before my eyes was not my lovely revised version of the story but my first draft. Apparently, in all the excitement of preparing for the move, I had never sync'd the memory stick to my desktop machine. Fine, I figured, I'll just have to get it off the laptop.

But it wasn't there either. That's when I remembered I had wiped the machine in June, and the story directory there was identical to the one on the desktop machine. With mounting horror, I tried a couple of different low-level scans on the laptop, but to no avail. The revised draft was gone.

It took me about another six months to work up the energy to tackle re-revising my first draft. That's what I did Sunday, taking a break from the minor revisions to The Accidental Terrorist that are my focus here for the next week or so. It took me all day to achieve what felt like a reasonably successful recreation of what I did in that Baltimore hotel room, far longer than those original revisions had taken. At the end of the day, I printed out the story and read it aloud to Laura while she cooked.

I made some notes on the manuscript as I read, as I usually do. Yesterday I went to the desktop machine to pull up the story and fix the elements I'd noted. What appeared before me was the original, untouched first draft. I was puzzled. I clearly recalled syncing the laptop to the desktop machine after printing the manuscript the day before, but perhaps I had goofed something up.

I turned on the laptop, which is where I had done the revisions. I brought up the story. I felt a knot in my stomach at the realization that this, too, was the original draft.

I had sync'd the wrong way, overwriting my revised draft with the original. I swear, something in my subconscious is out to get this story.

At least this time I have a printout of what I did. All I need to do is type it back in. (No scanner here for an OCR shortcut.) Of course, all the stalling blogging I've done so far today will demonstrate how mountainous even that simple task seems to me right now.

There is a literary agency directly above me, on the 13th floor of this office building. (And thank god we're in a building that's not afraid to admit it has a 13th floor!) Sometimes when the 12th floor men's room is occupied, I go up to the 13th floor, and inevitably I see, through the glass of the agency's door, a little spaniel of some sort lying on the floor, asleep. I never see any people.

On my most recent visit to the 13th floor, though, I saw people in the office but no spaniel. This is not a story about mysterious happenings on the 13th floor, but it is a story about a runaway spaniel, and I was reminded of it by the absence of the agency dog. This happened this past Saturday night, as Laura and I were on our way to a wedding celebration.

We had just left the house. It was cold and dark and windy and wet out, and when we reached the corner a brown and white adult spaniel of some sort, probably a Cavalier King Charles, was wandering around. Its person was not in evidence.

"Hello, little puppy," said Laura, bending down.

A woman in black was hurrying toward us. "I was just trying to catch it," she said. "I don't see its owner."

"Let's see if it has a tag," I said.

The dog was dragging a sparkly silver leash. Laura reached for the leash, but the dog ran out into the street against the light. A car was coming. I yelled—it wasn't a word, just a loud primal sound. The dog came three feet or less from running right under the tires of an SUV. It got to the far corner before the next car could squash it.

Relieved, Laura and I dashed across the street (when traffic allowed), and she caught the dog half a block down. I turned and flashed the lady in black a thumbs-up. "It has a tag," I shouted.

We walked the dog farther down the block to where we could read the tag in the light from an Eckerd. It was a rabies tag. The only contact info was the phone number of the vet.

"What do we do?" Laura said.

"I'm not sure," I said. Then we realized that we had both left our cell phones home. Not that the vet was likely to be open at that hour.

"Maybe take it to the pet store?" We were on our way to a wedding, remember. "They might be able to keep it until they can contact the vet."

"I wouldn't take it there. Maybe that vet down Steinway is open?"

"Okay."

We started walking. The spaniel was not a quick walker, not like Ella, and it was whimpering and maybe limping a little, so after a bit I picked it up and carried it. We didn't like the vet idea, really, but was also didn't want to leave the dog at our apartment unattended, not unsupervised with a dog of our own. But the farther we walked from where we first saw it, the more the dog began to whine and squirm.

Finally Laura suggested we take the dog back the way we had come. We would see if maybe the owner was somewhere around looking for it. If not, we would close the dog in one of our rooms with the door closed, and with water. It would drive Ella nuts, but we didn't know what else to do.

As we approached the corner where we had first seen the spaniel, we could see about four people. The woman in black was there, as was a long-haired woman in her mid-twenties. The long-haired woman had her back against a wall, and a man in a big black coat was standing very close to her, talking. There was also a kid of about twenty, standing near the entrance of a little store around the corner.

"Here they are!" said the woman in black.

Laura and I both saw that the long-haired woman had tears running down her cheeks. "Is this your dog?" I asked.

The woman burst our sobbing and took the dog from me. "Oh, I thought you were gone!" She clutched the dog to her chest and slid down the wall until she was sitting.

The woman in black said, "I told her the dog almost got runned over, but a nice couple went after it."

Laura had squatted down beside the long-haired woman and was making comforting small talk. I noticed the dog was standing next to the sobbing woman.

"For God's sake!" I told the sobbing woman. "Keep that leash in your hand and don't let go!"

According to Laura, when I yelled, the woman wrapped the leash around her hand several times. Also according to Laura, the woman was on something.

When the long-haired woman had calmed down some and was standing up again, she said, "Where did that man go?"

"What man?" said the woman in black.

"The policeman. He was talking to me right here. He has my wallet."

Indeed, the man in the black coat had somehow slipped away in the confusion of returning the dog.

"Why does he have your wallet?" asked the woman in black.

"He said he was a policeman," said the long-haired woman. "He asked for my wallet."

"Did he show you any I.D.?"

"No, but he said he was a policeman."

"That guy took her wallet," said the woman in black. "Did anyone see where he went?"

The kid near the store said, "I think maybe he lives upstairs?" Another kid had come out of the store by now.

"We need to call the police," said the woman in black. "The real police. Who has a phone?"

We didn't, but the kids outside the store went inside to call.

Laura was already hurrying up the block, trying to see if a man walking up the sidewalk was the same one who had been at the corner. He wasn't, but that didn't keep me from worrying that Laura was going to get herself shot peering into people car windows.

We returned to the group on the corner, reported that the man in the black coat was nowhere in sight, wished the long-hair woman good luck, said goodbye to the spaniel, and rushed off to our wedding. We don't know what happened next.

Moral of the story? Um, if your dog is missing, don't give your wallet to a random stranger?

And for God's sake, don't let go of the leash!

For the past few days, I've thought I might smell just a dash, just a soupçon, just one wafer-thin mint's worth of natural gas in the kitchen. I would sniff, and Laura would tell me I was crazy. It happens.

Last night I thought I smelled it, and this time Laura allowed as how she might smell it too. I didn't call ConEd immediately, having a vague memory of a similar situation in my Brooklyn apartment and being made to understand by the man who came to check it out that I had been kind of silly not to know this wasn't the dangerous kind of gas smell.

So I called up ConEd very late this morning, from work. In the voicemail treet, I deliberately did not choose the emergency options. I waited for a customer service representative. I said I might have smelled a little gas in my kitchen.

"What's your address, sir?"

I gave it, expecting that next we would schedule a little confab for later in the week at which I would sit home for hours wondering what time the gas man would deign to arrive, and the gas man would fritter away his day and finally show up with five minutes to spare before the end of the agreed-upon appointment window.

"Thank you," said the customer service guy. "Someone will arrive within forty-five minutes."

"Um." My brain shut down. "It was just— I was expecting— I'm not home. I'm calling from work."

"Sir, we take gas leaks seriously. They're very dangerous. We treat them as emergencies."

"But, I thought— I'm not—"

"Is someone home?"

"No."

"Is there a neighbor? A landlord?"

"No, there's not— I'm— Can't you—?"

"Sir, we dispatch these calls immediately. If they arrive and no one is home, they will break down the door. We treat these as emergencies."

I finally got my head around it. "So they're on their way."

"Yes, sir. Where are you?"

"In the city. How long do I have?"

"Zero to forty-five minutes, depending. Sir, I suggest you get there if you don't want your door broken down."

I dashed off a terse email to Paul Witcover, with whom I was supposed to have lunch, and dashed out the door. The elevator refused to come, so I ran down the stairs. I grabbed a cab on Park Avenue and directed it homeward.

As we flew up Park Avenue, I tried calling Laura, but she was doing presentations at work and didn't answer. I tried calling a friend who lives nearby to see if she was home or working today, but got no reply. I would have tried calling our other friends who might both have been home because they are moving out of state soon, but I needed to talk to the first friend to get their number.

I was thinking less about the doors to the building and the apartment than about Ella, and whether she would end up wandering the streets after the ConEd men burst through the splintered portals like Big Brother's henchmen.

The cab seemed to crawl. It was like a race against time from a movie, except it never seemed to end. Everything that could possibly get in the way did. Trucks backed up into intersections. People abandoned cars in the street. Vehicles failed to move in time at traffic lights and we missed our chances. Traffic snarled and gridlocked. Traffic actually got worse in Queens the closer we got to home, and I watched the time edge past 25 minutes.

At 30 minutes, after I'd been calculating for some blocks at what point it would be faster to just hop out of the cab and run the rest of the way, we finally turned onto my street. I had 22 bucks already in my hand, my shoulder bag strapped around me, and my door keys at the ready. Heart in throat, I spied a ConEd van pulled over at the curb opposite our apartment. I scanned the front of the building from half a block away, but didn't think I could see any door-busting damage.

Then as we slowed down and I tossed the money at the driver through the plexiglas window, I saw one lone ConEd man loitering by the van. He wore a visored cap and had a long gray mustache. I hopped out of the cab almost before it had stopped and ran to the door, greeting the ConEd man over my shoulder.

As I hurriedly shoved aside the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door slot, I asked the ConEd man, "Have you been waiting long?"

"Just got here," he said.

He looked to me as if he had been loitering for a bit, but I was grateful and relieved (though my hands were still shaking) and I didn't want to push it. I warned him about the dog, burst into the apartment, shoved a very confused Ella out into the back yard and shut the door on her.

I was doing everything in movie-hero time.

The taciturn ConEd man checked the stove and told me we had a pilot light out. He relit it, then used a length of rubber hose connected to what looked like a small car battery with an LCD readout to check for natural gas. "Negative," he said. "You're fine."

And he left. And I joined the dog in the back yard, where she flung herself at me repeatedly and covered my head with licks while I let the jammering of my nerves dissipate.

Then it came to me. That's what the other guy had told me in Brooklyn that one time. One of my pilot lights had gone out then too, and he had shown me how to light it again. I wonder if I'll still remember this by the next time it happens.

The first science fiction magazine I ever saw, read, subscribed to, submitted to, and was rejected by was Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Back in 1983, when I was almost 16 years old, my father brought a copy home for me after it became clear to him that writing SF was just simply going to be something that I did, and there would be no use complaining about it. He found the magazine at a 7-Eleven and showed me the address for fiction submissions. It was a generous gesture on his part, especially since a few years earlier he had forbidden me to read the evil stuff.

That first issue had a Fred Pohl story on the cover, I recall, "The High Test." I read the magazine greedily, then called the phone number inside to subscribe. The woman on the other side of the line wanted me to give a credit card number. It took some doing, but I convinced her to enter my subscription without one, and to bill me later. I'm not sure why I didn't just mail in a subscription card. I think I was just too excited to get my subscription started.

Before long, I had my first rejection in hand—a photocopied sheet of possible reasons my story was not of use to Asimov's, with editor Shawna McCarthy's second-generation signature at the bottom. Crushed but undeterred, I sent in another story. Same outcome.

Every time the new issue arrived, I would read it cover to cover. Those pages are where I first read Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Norman Spinrad, Dan Simmons, and a host of other exemplary short fiction writers I'm forgetting now. I still have many of those issues, the ones with the stories that affected me most. "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler is one of the first that comes to mind. More even than the novels I had long read, those stories were my first real education in the art and craft of writing science fiction.

I would lie in bed some nights and picture myself in that company. I would picture my name on the cover of Asimov's.

Years went by. Editors changed. I kept writing and submitting stories. Eventually I started making sales—to other magazines. I made a lot. I even landed Shawna McCarthy as my agent and received a Nebula nod. And still that stack of Asimov's rejections got higher and higher. Something like 50 sheets high.

Then last year an email came from Sheila Williams, the newest Asimov's editor. She had received, read, and wanted to buy my novella "Inclination." The streak was officially broken.

Today Associate Editor Brian Bieniowski dropped by my office. He hand-carried me my contributor's copies of the April/May 2006 Asimov's, which should be available on newsstands early next week. (I do have the tremendous good fortune of working ridiculously close to the Dell Magazines offices.)

Twenty-three years later, my name is on the cover of Asimov's. I will admit to having to swallow a lump in my throat. I'm glad that young, starry-eyed kid is still around to see this—especially in an issue that Sheila describes in her editorial as coming-of-age–themed.

Yes, we all seem to be more up in arms today about James Frey and his partially made-up memoir than we are about domestic wiretaps, freedom of information in China, and terrorists taking power in Palestine. And it makes sense to me why.

Countless hordes of people feel like they were lied to by James Frey. The reason this is more upsetting than being lied to by the President and his cronies—which happens and continues to happen on a regular basis—is that we're used to being lied to by politicians. We may be appalled by it, but we take this as expected behavior.

Writers, however, are a breed apart. Yes, their main job is to entertain us, but when they're doing their job well they are saying something true to us about what it means to be human, something that resonates in us, the readers, to our very cores. Thousands upon thousands of people felt that James Frey had told them something very resonant and true about their own lives, only now it's come out that what he said was, in many ways, made up. Of course people are upset. Of course they feel betrayed. On some level it must feel like finding out your spouse has been leading a double life.

I feel betrayed as well, but not because I read and believed A Million Little Pieces. I have not read the book. I feel betrayed as a writer on behalf of my profession. James Frey's responsibility as a writer was to tell the truth, and he failed to live up to that responsibility.

But what do I mean by "telling the truth"? Certainly writers of fiction do not "tell the truth" in the conventional sense of the phrase. They make up stories. But the stories they make up should speak to a deeper truth, saying something true about the way the world and the human soul work. The best fiction is made up from whole cloth yet woven from the fabric of reality. It is true in a way more meaningful that mere facts can be.

But a memoir is a different case. It's a work that stakes a claim to a different sort of territory. By saying "This really happened to me," the memoirist sets up a different set of rules for himself. His job is still to entertain and to illuminate the truth of the human condition, but even as he employs some of the same tools as the novelist, he has excluded himself from using a certain other subset of those tools—namely, the right to freely invent incidents and events.

Note that I say "freely." No memoir can possibly be unimpeachably factual in its every aspect. Conversations from years past can never be reconstructed accurately, for instance—unless they happen to have been recorded—and would likely make for less than compelling reading if they were. Events in the real world rarely have the dramatic arc of compelling fiction. Participants in those events may be less than thrilled to see themselves portrayed in all their factual warty glory. The memoirist deploys the novelist's tools insofar as he chooses what events to emphasize and how, in what ways to distill amalgams of old conversations to their most readable, meaningful essence, and what balance between literal reportage and obfuscating detail to employ in order to avoid embarrassing the real participants—or prodding them to legal action.

What the memoirist definitively cannot do is make up events without letting the reader know.¹ To do so is to shatter the delicate surface tension between real-world facts and the amount of distortion they can bear while still rendering a more deeply truthful report of the world. Or, if not to shatter it immediately, certainly to set up conditions to make it more likely to be shattered at some point in the future. As has happened with James Frey and A Million Little Pieces.

Never has a book's title reflected the state of its pretense to truth more accurately.

For all that I feel betrayed as a writer, I can understand and even sympathize with what happened to Frey. He says he tried marketing his manuscript as a novel originally. And perhaps as a novel A Million Little Pieces could have survived as a work that speaks to a core truth. But the moment Frey decided to call the book a memoir instead, he changed the nature of relationship between the outer and inner worlds of the work. Whatever truths lay at its heart were now subject to a different set of torsions from without, were now viewed through a different prism—choose what metaphor you will. The work changed.

The work changed in a way that no doubt made it easier for him to sell to a publisher, and consequently made it easier for a publisher to sell to the public. It had to have been a very tempting and even easy choice to make—but once made it led, as lies will, to even bigger lies, and then to bigger lies still. At what point does to stop seeming possible to reverse the avalanche you've started? How much effort must it take to keep trying to outdistance it? I don't envy James Frey the last couple of years, let alone the past few weeks.

I'll come clean here. Part of what pisses me off about the whole situation is that Frey, at least at the moment, is continuing to make money off his big lie, big money. He may be taking a world of shit, but you know what? At the end of it all, he still has the wherewithal to do write—a pursuit for which he obviously has vast talent—fulltime. And he has the wherewithal for all the therapy and/or rehab he still so richly needs.

And still The Accidental Terrorist, over which I labored hard, and in which I went to exquisite pains to adhere to the truth as best I could, sits unsold, while I sit here in a 7th floor office in Manhattan doing a job that merely pays the bills and doesn't feed my soul.

Okay, whatever. We all have it tough, and I feel real sympathy for James Frey and the hole he's dug for himself. I live in fear of the mere thought of the accusations of lying that may be leveled at me by pissed-off Mormons when my memoir finally sees print. Hell, I have moments when I fear that I did make up the whole story of my arrest and conviction. Being caught out and called to task can't be a very pleasant experience. But that doesn't change the fact that James Frey lied and lied his way to the top of the bestseller lists, and if the worst he has to endure as a consequence is a stern tongue-lashing from Oprah, well boo fucking hoo. We should all be so well rewarded for our bad decisions.

That doesn't mean Oprah herself get a free pass on this one. I'm sure she feels genuinely pissed off at James Frey, but I doubt very much it comes from a personal sense of betrayal. No, James Frey put her precious Book Club in jeopardy. Do you think Oprah would have chosen Elie Wiesel's Night as her latest club selection, let alone announced a high school essay contest about it, if she didn't need to distract us from the unpleasant little storm brewing over A Million Little Pieces? Not a chance. Frey taking his lumps on television yesterday was all business. Bank on it.

I'll buy Oprah's sincerity when she gets someone like George Bush on her show and lambastes him for lies that matter to something more than just our feelings.

When I first secured my own domain, shunn.net, one of the pleasures of that vanity acquisition was catch-all email forwarding. What this meant was that any email sent to shunn.net—whether hunkylitfox@shunn.net, scumsuckingasswipe@shunn.net or mr.mxyzptlk@shunn.net—would end up in my inbox. In essence, I had an infinite set of email addresses to call my own.*

This was back in those heady days when spam was still a relatively scarce and benign offense, though even then the prudent were being warned not to put "mailto" URLs on their web sites, owing to the many robots out harvesting just such creatures to feed into their nefarious spam machines.

Over the years, as the tide of spam has risen, I've applied an increasing rigorous series of filters to hold back the onslaught. I've watched my daily spam intake increase logarithmically—maybe one a day back in the day, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. Yes, a thousand.

Part of this was due, I admit, to having placed many of those pesky bill@shunn.net links on my site. By the time I realized I seriously needed to scour them, the damage was done. My email address was out there, prominently listed amongst the ingredients for spam. But that was not all of it. Spammers grew more clever by leaps and bounds. They took to running whole dictionaries of common and not-so-common first names through their software, pairing each with domain names that anyone could glean from a handy DNS server. I received spam targeted at everyone from aaron@shunn.net to zusu@shunn.net.

I began filtering for spam at the client level, but then the spammers started targeting long lists of last names. smith@shunn.net, jones@shunn.net, and hickenlooper@shunn.net all were wooed with offers of low remortgaging, ch34p v14gr4, and penile enhancement. I erected my fortress walls higher, applying filters at the server level as well as at the client level.

Still the floodwaters continued to rise as spammers came up with ever-cleverer techniques for foiling the ever-cleverer filters. But even as good as the filters became, if I didn't leave my email client running all night, it could take upward of half an hour for my software to download and process all the messages that arrived in the course of eight short hours. I finally shut down bill@shunn.net entirely, shifting the burden of my personal correspondence to a different address that I'm not stupid enough to print here.

Still the levels rose.

I'm not sure quite why I waited so long—perhaps because I was loath to lose any of the increasingly rare real email messages suspended in that rising tide. But today something snapped, as I awoke to the prospect of downloading more than three thousand email messages to find the wheat amidst the chaff. Projected out over a full day, that's ten thousand emails in 24 hours. That's just unsupportable.

My catch-all forwarding is no more. I have set up a bare handful of email addresses where messages can actually get through to me, but everything else at shunn.net, and indeed at any of the other domains I now own, but everything else will bounce. And the bounces contain a message that wishes the ingestion of shards of fused silicon dioxide and subsequent painful expiration upon the senders of unsolicited commercial email.

So far today, since slamming the fortress gates shut this morning, exactly two spam messages have gotten through. I feel as if, having lain awake at night for months upon months while the neighbors run heavy excavation and construction equipment, they've finally been evicted and I can hear the crickets chirping again. Ah, blissful quiet!

If only I wasn't certain those two messages represent the leading edge of another slow logarithmic assault.

Ladies, there's a rather delicate topic that's been weighing on my mind of late, and I feel it urgently begs addressing. I will attempt to be circumspect.

For about a year now, I've been hearing and reading in various places reports of women's disgust for men on the subways and buses who sit with their legs spread wide, airing out their, er, jewel purses. While I share these ladies' unease at the blatant and provocative display of these, er, squirrel hoards, and deplore the way practitioners of said sitting position so often take up a seat and a half or more on crowded conveyances with their callously splayed limbs, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that your male fellow travelers are in all likelihood not truly attempting to impress you with the contents of their, er, fruit baskets, except possibly in an entirely unconscious evolutionary sense.

These men may indeed be clods, but they are clods in the sense of blithe social obliviousness rather than one of creepy cloddish lasciviousness. My attention having been called to the queasy-making effects of this practice on the distaff sex, I've been putting forth a concerted effort to monitor the degree of the interior angle between my own resting appendages, and I've been horrified to discover that even a male as relatively enlightened as myself tends to open his, er, equipment locker to public inspection during unguarded moments on the commute. I have striven mightily to keep my knees in close proximity but have discovered to my dismay that this necessitates concentrated effort. I'm sorry indeed to report that the airing of the, er, lumber bin would appear to be the natural state of the seated male Homo sapiens.

It's all in the construction of the pelvis bone, you see. The way our femurs connect makes the leg turn naturally outward when sitting. To draw our knees together, our thigh muscles must flex, must perform work, must burn actual calories. I say this not to excuse our troglodytishness but merely to explain that our wretched behavior is directed at you only on a genetic level, not a conscious one, and that when our, er, birthday parcels are pointing your way we've merely momentarily relaxed our vigilence, if indeed we possessed any in the first place, in exhaustion.

With knees locked firmly together and thighs a-tremble, I remain
yr humble servant

The following remarks were delivered at the Sheraton City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, on the occasion of the Davis High School (Kaysville) 1984 class reunion. The opening paragraph is in response to master of ceremonies Jodi Allison, my employment by the National Council on the Aging having prompted from her some mordant comment or another.

I'll tell you how I'm doing with that aging thing, Jodi. I'm still 36. At least until tomorrow.

I hope you'll forgive me if I read from my notes. I'm afraid if I wing it I'll start talking like a New Yorker from sheer nerves. Anyway, it's an honor and a humbling experience to stand before you on this beautiful Friday the 13th and remember the Davis High School Class of '84. Looking out over this crowd—man, a lot's changed since high school. Speaking for myself, I don't think I'd even fit in my locker anymore. But that's why we're here tonight—change. We've come together to celebrate not just old times but having survived all the changes between then and now. So when Cheri asked me to speak, I started thinking what it was like in that year George Orwell made ominous, 1984, and how different our world is two decades later from the one we knew then.

Let's go back to May of 1984 for a few minutes and try to remember what it was like. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and we didn't know for sure about the Alzheimer's yet, and Walter Mondale was shortly to chose Geraldine Ferraro as the first (and so far only) woman to run for vice-president on a major-party ticket. The Iran-Contra scandal was still two years from breaking, the Berlin Wall was five years from falling, and the Soviet Union, the only significant threat to world peace most of us could imagine, was seven years from collapsing under its own weight. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were both still flying, and the president would not use the term "AIDS" in public for another year. Closer to home, Scott Matheson was governor of the state. Today his son is running for the same office, against the son of chemical mogul Jon Huntsman. In sports, John Stockton had just been drafted from Gonzaga by the Utah Jazz. Karl Malone would be drafted from Louisiana Tech the following year.

The Billboard #1 hits so far that year were "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club, "Jump" by Van Halen, "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins, "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins, "Hello" by Lionel Richie, and, the week we graduated, "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams. The Police were the most popular band in the world, Sting was still cool, and Darin Goff was the only one in the school who'd heard of R.E.M. (And Darin, you'll be pleased to hear my father still doesn't like me hanging out with you.) You could like new wave or hair metal but not both, and no one would ever have guessed that in 2004 you could put on your white socks and sandals and sign up for a week-long Caribbean cruise with Styx, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. Oh, yeah, and we mostly listened to this stuff on cassette or LP. The compact disc had been around for a year or two, but most of what you could buy on CD was classical music.

In movies, the Star Wars saga had ended the year before—or so we thought. The top flicks the year so far had been Footloose, Police Academy ... One, Romancing the Stone, and the one I cut seminary to see, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Kaysville Theater was a year away from getting picketed when it showed its first R-rated movie, Beverly Hills Cop, and still to come that summer were Star Trek III, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, and Purple Rain. (Purple Rain. Man. Last month my wife and I had front row seats at Madison Square Garden to see Prince, together with Morris Day & The Time. What a show. It's funny how nostalgic we get for music we didn't even listen to when it was new.)

On television the top shows were Dallas, Dynasty, and The A-Team. M*A*S*H had been over for a year, and Cheers was only two years old. Seinfeld was still six years in the future, Friends ten, and The Sopranos was, you know, fuhgeddaboutit.

The state of the art in home computers was the Apple IIe, which had a ceiling of a whopping 128 kilobytes of memory. Today I carry one thousand times as much storage capacity on my wrist, in the form of a USB drive built into my watch, and at least fifty times as much as what existed in the entire computer lab at Davis High. And even that is just a tiny fraction of what comes today with the lowest-end home computer.

The Internet existed in 1984, but it linked only government, university, and research institutions. If you went online, you were probably dialing into a bulletin-board system somewhere. On today's Internet, it may indeed seem that Big Brother is watching far us more closely than in 1984, but on the other hand we have a much better view of him. The sum total of human knowledge is at our fingertips, just a Google search away, right alongside and sometimes indistinguishable from warnings about organ-harvesting rings in Cabo San Lucas, pleas for help getting money out of Nigeria, and lists of what kids in 2004 no longer know that kids from 1984 did. Back then the research for this little summation would have taken me half a day at a good library. Instead I did it at my kitchen table in less than an hour while my laptop computer played Beethoven sonatas over a wireless network connection to my desktop computer in the next room.

Okay, that's a little of what the world was like when we were in high school, but what about high school itself? In a way, every one of us went to a different high school, with different schedules and different teachers and different friends. That's one of the things that makes a reunion like this so interesting—comparing and contrasting our different memories to get a more complete picture of what that time was really like. So keeping in mind how subjective this is, I want to share some of the random things I remember from high school.

I remember the teachers. I remember English class with Mrs. Storey, who made discussing Faulkner fun, and who always had personalized suggestions of great books that weren't on the curriculum but which she was pretty sure we'd enjoy reading anyway.

I remember economics with Bryant Jensen, who made me feel as if I actually understood economics, at least for as long as he was explaining it, and who occasionally made me feel like the dumbest kid on the face of the earth, which was probably good for me.

I remember chemistry with Frank Stevens, who we convinced ourselves was the lost seventh member of Monty Python. And there was his stuffed mole, which we kidnapped as often as we could from behind his increasingly paranoid security measures and held for ransom.

I remember Lenzi Nelson, a great math teacher who always complained that in twenty years all we'd remember from his class was that he threw chalk. Well, I'm sure anyone who had him remembers the chalk, but he was my first computer teacher, and I'm still doing that today, so something else must have stuck from all those hours in his classes.

I remember Mrs. Hill, who was the advisor to the Dart staff, who let Matt Kimball paint a giant ska man on the back wall of the Dart staff room. I wasn't even sure exactly what "ska" was, but I liked having that big black silhouette gazing down on us as Emilie Bean and I laid out the paper every month.

I remember football games in the fall and winter, and how the social scene in the stands was almost as important as what was happening on the field. And then I remember the excitement of the state playoffs, going to see our team play at Rice Stadium, and showing up at those games in my black trenchcoat, long before black trenchcoats started becoming seen as a "danger sign." (Don't worry—there was no easy access to firearms at home.) But damn, that team was good, with Steve Sargent and Greg McNabb and everyone else, and not taking State was one of history's great tragedies.

I remember the marquee out in front of the school, and the little jolt of anticipation wondering what the thing was going to say this time. Often as not, it was a message from someone to someone else asking if they'd go with them to the next school dance. I mean, how could you say no to the Davis High marquee?

And that's another thing I remember—all the effort and elaborate planning that went into asking someone to a dance without actually walking up to them and doing it face-to-face. And every time, it had to be bigger and better than the time before. It was like Mutual Assured Destruction. The U.S. hires a skywriter, so Russia plans a fireworks display. Russia gets the Utah Jazz to deliver its message, so the U.S. gets the Utah Symphony. And the best part about it is the victim's reaction when the operation goes into effect. You come home and find that someone has brought in dump trucks to fill the entire basement of your house with Styrofoam packing peanuts, and the first thing out of your mouth, with genuine puzzlement, is, "Oh my heck! What's this?" So you spend the next three days cleaning it all out, and when you finally get that last final packing peanut out from under the couch and put it under your electron scanning microscope to find that someone has used a calligraphy brush made from the eyelash of a fruitfly to write "Will you go to Christmas Dance with me?" on it in ancient Chinese—then, then, you slap yourself on the forehead and say, "Oh, thank goodness. For a couple of days there I thought it might be Al Qaeda."

I tell you, we should have gotten graded on asking people to dances. We should have gotten credit toward graduation for it. There are Pentagon generals who've never done as much logistical planning as went into asking someone to a dance. But I digress.

There's more I remember, but most of all I remember people who are no longer with us. Who could forget, or hasn't tried to, the morning intercom announcements from Mr. Cook, which always wrapped up with a rundown of the lunch menu including that "one—half—pint—milk"? I remember hearing the news about Mr. Cook's passing many years ago, and I imagine he's now singing lustily with the heavenly choir—and goosing the other angels when no one's looking. ("What are you whining about, Chumley?")

And then there's Mrs. Beattie, one of the most influential and most frustrating teachers I ever had, who passed away just this spring. As far as I know she never moved to Florence after she retired, which she always said she intended to, but she lived quite a life nonetheless, and left her mark on countless students through the years.

There are no doubt others I don't know about, and there are classmates, too, who sadly are no longer with us, and who we miss. John Whicker, Kim Burton. Alan Rushforth, who's been gone for more than twenty years. If there are others, we're thinking of them all, and of the family and friends who no longer enjoy their company and presence.

Finally, one monumental part of the Class of 1984 is longer with us. I've just driven along Main Street in Kaysville for the first time in a couple of years, and I saw there's a new building that's gone up where our Davis High School stood for nearly a century. It's funny how there are some buildings you spend so much time in, whose corridors you scurry through for so many years, but you take them for granted, and it isn't until they come down that you realize what an important symbol and landmark they were in the community while they still existed, and what a long shadow they cast. I'm sure the new school will serve its students just as well, but it's still strange to think of the town without our dear old Davis High School

To close, I'd like to consider one of the great myths we tell ourselves about high school—that it's an either/or proposition, that it was either our glory days and the rest of life is all downhill, or it was hell on earth and we spend the remainder of life trying to recover from it. I think for most of us the truth is probably somewhere in between. I know it was for me, and I thank you, Class of '84, for helping to make my high school experience the good thing it was. I hope it was good for you, and that as the world has changed and our children have started taking our places, things have kept getting better from there.

The fact that so many of us actually showed up tonight would seem to indicate that this is, indeed, the case. Thank you.