Book Publishers Finally Discover Internet Writers

Collegestories.com, a humor website (not to be confused with collegehumor.com, the site which was recently purchased by Barry Diller for several million dollars), just released an anthology entitled Class Dismissed (Villard, 2006).  Without a doubt this book will make several times as much money as all the movies set to be derived from the collegehumor content.

It seems that drunken frat boy humor is making a comeback of late. The New York Times reported on this trend recently in the Style section, singling out the lifestyle magazine Modern Drunkard and several forthcoming novels.

Why, may you ask, should we care?  Well, this blog's Slice-of-Lifer, Ed Hamilton, has a story in the Anthology.  We haven’t seen a copy of the book yet, so we don’t know if they used the author’s photo, but they requested a humorous one.  Here’s what they got from Ed, much to the dismay of his mother, who wanted us to send a photo of Ed in his first communion outfit.  In retrospect, perhaps that would have been funnier, or at least more ironic.

Here’s an excerpt from Ed’s story, but that’s all you get for free.  You’ll have to buy a copy of Class Dismissed to read the whole story.  (It’s also an excerpt from a novel, but Ed’s still waiting for somebody to snatch that up.)

Soon, I was hopelessly lost. The houses were getting shittier and shittier, more ramshackle. At one of the houses there were some long-haired rednecks hanging out on their front porch. They were older than me, probably in their early thirties. There were three of them, and a fat woman redneck.

They looked friendly enough, so I figured I'd ask them for directions. But in my drunken state, stumbling up into their yard, I chose an ill-advised greeting:

"Hey you guys, got any reefer?"

The men just sat there, expressionless, but the woman jumped up and screamed at me, hysterically, "No! Get out of here!

That seemed downright inhospitable. I decided to take my revenge on her by hanging out there for a while. "I wasn't even talking to you, lady," I said. Then, addressing the man nearest me, the one with a beard, I said, "You probably got some reefer, don't you, man?"