Results of Ruminations

My firstborn child came to us with half of a heart, suffering from a condition known as hypoplastic right heart syndrome. Through the course of the first six months of his life, we spent countless hours in the hospital, running tests, and carrying about a wired baby--plugged into his oxygen, his pulseoxymeter, or both. He nearly slid away from us on a couple of different occasions during those early months. He was born on an auspicious week, as it were. I had finished my student teaching a month or so before and had lost my potential career by this point. Despite that, I had finished college, and commencement ceremonies were to be held the last full week of April 2007. Also, my birthday was coming, and I love my birthday. I just like having the attention, I think. So, on 25 April, two days after Shakespeare's (alleged) birthday, my little boy Peter was born. I didn't get to hold him until the next day, my own birthday. The day after that, I was sitting in the McKay Events

Love leads to emulation. When I first started playing the guitar, I learned exclusively from a guitar/piano/vocal book of Dave Matthews Band's Under the Table and Dreaming . It gave me the rudiments of barre chords, open chords, and rhythm. I pored over that book with obsessive focus, breaking the G-string on my dad's guitar a couple of times in a single week with my enthusiastic strumming. Soon I became proficient at the simple things, moving on to more advanced fingerings, different genres of music, and--eventually--my own compositions. Those early ones, so heavily engrained in my brain, still can spring to my fingertips with precious little coaxing. And almost all of those original tunes are heavily Dave Matthews Band derivatives. The strumming patterns, the chord voicings, the tempos--they all branched out from beneath the leaves of that first book. While Shakespeare was by no means the first of my writing that became emulative (I had written my fair share of Spider-Ma

During the time of anchorless living when my dreams of a career in writing seemed as far away as my hopes of a career in the classroom, I stumbled upon the idea of the authorship question. As I've already pointed out my major gripes with the whole bag of malarkey, let me say instead what I wish we'd focus on, rather than pointless drivel about conspiracies and centuries' old secrets. I have to fast-forward chronologically to get to this point, but I think it's a crucial one. Back in the summer of '09, the local NPR affiliate, KUER, did an hour long segment on the Antistratfordian position, citing heavy hitters like Supreme Court Justices and Mark Twain as skeptics when it came to the authenticity of Shakespeare of Stratford. In it, they interviewed for a few brief minutes Ace G. Pilkington, a frequent facilitator of conversations at the post-show discussions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Gayle and I had recently learned about these conversations, nestled in