Guest Lecturer, GCCC

Friday, February 5

Mike Lister taught a non-credit writing class

at Gulf Coast Community College, one at Port St. Joe

and one at the campus in Panama City. He invited me to

address each one. The one in St. Joe was books and the one

in Panama City was movies. Once I had enrolled at Gulf Coast as

a special student in the Lifelong Learning Center to use the computers in

the Open Computer Lab, but I was discovered, and asked to leave. The computers

were for classroom use only. That is, for homework assignments for students

enrolled in regular classes. I was humiliated. I felt like an interloper,

who had been exposed. “It was all I had,” I cried to Brenda.

I was suffering post-traumatic stress from chronic, permanent

unemployment already. Those shit-asses. I called myself a writer-

in-residence. I changed it to writer-expelled. In the College of

Hard Knocks an expulsion is often a promotion.

Now, here I was. Back. The water tower

in Jefferson, Mississippi, was,

“a footprint.” For Snopeses.