I haven’t always done the right thing. That’s the truth. But every once in a blue moon I find myself telling myself, “Rodney, get out of them blood stained shorts and do something that somebody can appreciate.” I don’t normally listen, and that’s how come I am who I am today.

     That’s how come everything I own is in a black trash bag that I swing over my back (and I keep it from falling by popping it with a whip). That’s how come I’ve already had two divorces from both of my sisters and God knows how many children between them. They never told me. That’s how come I call a desolate stretch of beach my home and I go to killing anybody that steps foot on my property, rain or shine.

     I’m just not who I used to be and if I could remember who I used to be, I’d have some sort of base of comparison. Anyway, that’s also why I decided to make this media reef, or reverend, or whatever it’s called, the best darn one I’ve ever done.

     You might ask how I did that. Simple, fella! I found me an old book that I’ve had buried in the sand for months, and instead of trying to read its tattered and rotten pages, I just flipped it on the back and read what some other critics had to say about it.

     And boy do I have a mouth full to spill on them.

     First of all, nobody took the time to finish or start anything they wrote. Everything started in the middle of a sentence and ended just the same. For example, “…Smashing success. It was the best read I’ve had since Cherry Sky. Barnley is, without a doubt, an up and coming young author we can expect to see around for a long time. Brilliant…”

     What is all that supposed to mean? Sounds like someone got hit on the head with a stale fish.

     Another example: “…Alarmingly vibrant! This book shouts at us what we won’t even whisper to ourselves…”

	Above: No book review is proper and right without a picture of me on it. This is the best picture I've ever seen of myself and it's a shame that man had to die in order to produce it.

Hey, if that book had an alarm, I’d be in jail right now. But here I am, sitting cross-legged in the surf scratching this article out on a piece of driftwood. So what is that guy talking about? And I don’t know about you, but the last time I heard a book whisper, let alone shout at me, was when I was sixteen years old in the basement of my grandmother’s house where she kept a bunch of old leather-bound novels and a couple of leaking tanks of chlorine gas.

     Another thing these folly-hop critics have in common is a tendency to never really tell you exactly what the book is really about. Here’s a third example that was back there on the back cover: “…A must read for every person who has felt the pressure of being the stranger in the greatest of social situations…”

     Some people just don’t know a thing about reading a book and letting everyone know what it was about and how good it was. I think people just use fancy words to confuse us because they really fell asleep when they were supposed to be reading, or either they decided to take a tug off of their worm in front of a nice titty book instead.