It occurs to me that I have been writing essays for most of my life. At some point, early in life, the thought of writing an essay, a.k.a., a book report, filled me with dread. I'm not sure why, except that it was work I had to do and I always put off that work until the last possible minute1. I would have sworn that it wasn't until high school that I started to change my mind about essays, that there was something to the attempt itself, which it turns out, is where the word comes from.
And then this morning, on my early walk, I was listening to SiriusXM 80s on 8 top 40 countdown for this week in 1987. The music immediately had me back in 9th grade, my final year at Porter Junior High School, and less than a month from graduating. I don't remember much about the writing I did in Junior High. I know that in 7th grade, we had to research and write books (short books) and then made bindings for them. My book was on Egypt, a subject I never would have chosen, except that I was trying to impress a girl, who liked Egypt. Indeed, I was much more into computers and technology than writing at that point in my life, even receiving recognition for a rudimentary flight simulator I created for my programming class. I received similar recognition for math. But writing? Not until high school!
And yet… Hearing those songs this morning had me wondering about that final year at Porter. I returned from my walk and sat down at this very laptop and at the command-line, I asked [ark](https://jamierubin.net/ark/) what I had in my archive from 9th grade. And the very first match surprised me: an outstanding merit award for the young authors project!
Now, truth be told, I don't remember the young authors project, and I would never refer to myself as a young author (or an old one for that matter). A writer, yes; an author? Not me. And I suspect that whatever it was that I was writing2, it was not essays. But it was a bridge of some kind that got me to high school, where the program I was in tested its students through a single method: the essay. It was there that I made countless “attempts” at writing essays to make an argument, to convince, or cajole, or to see just how many pages I could whip out in cursive in a 2-hour period without my hand falling off.
It is because of those essays that the essays I wrote in college were both more enjoyable and easier to do. I'd already had my 10,000 hours of practice3. And it was in those college essays — where I Puckishly avoided the traditional stilted style and wrote mostly colloquially — that I developed the style that would become what I think is the voice of these attempts.
Incidentally, this week's countdown wasn't a bad one. But given that I am now out of junior high school some 39 years, I can't for the life of me recall what the #1 song was.
