Let me clarify. I have not personally reached 100, no matter what my joints may tell me. Instead, this week I’m celebrating my 100th column for the Bison. Almost exactly seven years ago, a student editor asked me to write an article for the paper. By the next semester, the gig had become permanent, and here I am today, still turning out weekly fluff for your amusement. I should mention that the student who invited me on board is no longer working for the Bison. In fact, I believe she has fled the state.
For readers who have only come to Harding in the last year or two, I need to catch you up on the previous 99 installments. So get yourself some chips and salsa while I pop in Seasons One through Seven of “Just the Clax.” Don’t worry — we’ll skip the outtakes and deleted sentences, and I’ll try to limit this to a highlight reel.
It all started in 2005 with “No Sport Jacket Required,” a reflection on my summer mission trip to a youth camp in Ukraine. A volunteer weekend in New Orleans after Katrina inspired the second article, along with a childhood memory of scrubbing “Star Wars” figures with 409 after our house caught fire. That was apparently all the pathos readers could take that fall, and the next semester’s columns took a sillier turn with a review of the latest “King Kong” remake, followed by Oscar predictions and a rant against 24-hour news networks.
During Season Two, I switched to cutting-edge journalism, exposing our Deep South obsession with big trucks, the greedy plot of Babies “R” Us to overstock parents with infant gear, the intrusion of cell phones into life’s quiet moments and the utter rudeness of giving expensive scented soap as a romantic gift.
We posed hard-hitting questions: Why would anyone want to watch deleted movie scenes? Why do some restaurants pack their napkin containers so tightly? Why does Arkansas have more tanning salons than bookstores? Why would anyone want to have a Disney-themed wedding? And why should a Tarheel have to come to Searcy to get hooked on basketball?
I’ve got to pick up the pace here. Season Three told readers what to think about tattoos, film ratings, eBay, Monopoly, Crittercams, the Mona Lisa, unwanted inventions, school bells, Facebook, the LG National Texting Championships, awkward sentences and designer pocketbooks. The year ended with an election-year political cliffhanger.
We upped our culture cred with Season Four, and an opening piece on Robert Frost. But it declined again immediately with “Spa Humbug” and assorted nonsense about the (so-called) History Channel, political pundits, Halloween, restaurant locator apps, crime melodramas, PETA, basketball referees, Red Bull and Wikipedia.
I made up for a fall 2009 hiatus by starting Season Five with a series of columns about my semester in the U.K., covering everything from English mustard to modern art. Then it was back to the usual drivel about pop culture: “Alice in Wonderland,” pizza buffets and a tribute to mustaches, wrapping up the year with a toast to my Sunday luncheon friends in “Tales from the Round Table.”
The purchase of my first home in 2010 provided golden material for Season Six, which covered HGTV, landscaping, lawnmowers and frogs. Perhaps the highlight was a friendly poetic feud with Dr. Cliff Ganus III over the proper way to make “Bison” plural, though I also got a kick out of switching April Fools’ Day columns with opinionista Jess Ardrey.
Season Seven brought you weed eater antics and Christmas toy memories, along with thoughts about Angry Birds, unity sand, Kindles and extreme couponing. Patient readers also endured tales of basketball goals and flatbed trucks, gutter cleaning, homemade arcades and a mild-mannered columnist turning 40. What possessed me to wrap the season up by attempting a column without the letter “e,” I’ll never know.
But I’m very grateful to my readers. Over the years you’ve suffered through silly parodies of “The Night Before Christmas” and “My Favorite Things.” You’ve let me weigh in on “Twilight,” “Harry Potter” and “The Hunger Games.” You have learned more than you cared to know about my adventures playing the elf who hated Christmas, losing the spelling bee, being mistaken for Mr. Noodle and getting a really big splinter. You’ve even stood with me as I’ve said goodbye to my dad, to my Uncle Mike, to Jim Bill McInteer, to Neale Pryor, to Coach Prock and to the late Georgetown One-Stop.
Writing this column is one of the great joys of my life at Harding, and I want to thank the Bison staff for giving me a corner of their awesome newspaper for seven years. If readers can stand another year of all this, then “Just the Clax” Season Eight is under way. It promises to be the most recent season yet.
