Why back porch?

What I envision here is not one of those prissy little stoops we call back porches today; rather it is the kind of old fashioned service porch you do not see in modern houses. Such porches usually contained old washtubs, tools that may or may not be in working order, and an assortment of other junk that people were always resolving to sort through and thin out. The difference is that Mac’s Back Porch contains the clutter of my mind. It seems that too many of my thoughts wound up on pieces of paper. Some took the form of letters I have written, others took the form of short stories, and others took a form all of their own. All wound up on the back porch.

I can almost here you saying: “All right, so it is a metaphor, but why did you choose a back porch?” It started back in high school. A friend of mine, Carl, would often coin pithy phrases to explain unexpected and often unpleasant events. After expressing such a phrase he would always add, “Carl’s law.” It was as though he was citing some authority for the explanation. Being rather competitive, I started citing my explanations as coming from “Mac’s Back Porch Philosophy.”

Later, when in college, I unwittingly used this mythical authority to poke some fun at academia. I say unwittingly because I was rather sloshed at the time. I discovered that drinking coffee all night while writing term papers jangled the nerves and led to mistakes, whereas a little alcohol at least gave the illusion of settling the nerves and made the task seem less onerous. On the night in question I had definitely overdone it, and I became downright whimsical. I decided to see if my professor would notice if I quoted myself. Of course, every quotation has to be footnoted and the reference must be cited in the bibliography. I got around this by citing the quotation as coming from “Mac’s Back Porch Philosophy, the unfinished volume of the unpublished works of Steve McKeand."

My Professor obviously noticed because when the graded papers were returned he said: “That was a pretty good paper, Mr. McKeand, but what was that business about Mac’s Back Porch Philosophy?”

“Well,” I replied. “I’ve always wanted to be considered an expert on something, and since no one else was going to quote me I did it myself.”

As the number of unpublished stories and other writings grew I began to think of the increasingly large stack of paper as mind clutter. Some of it is entertaining, but I cannot put a financial value on it at this time. So here it sits, on my back porch. You are cordially invited to sort through it and read it. I hope you enjoy it.