'Off the Wall' is back, but not all that much

By Tobin Barnes

Haven’t done this for a while.

            Write a column, that is.

            Few years back, I used to do it all the time…about once a week and that for about fourteen years. The column was called “Off the Wall.”

            It was about anything and everything and nothing in particular.

Believe it or not, newspapers used to pay me, too. Not much, of course—just peanuts really.

And what does a guy do with peanuts?

Things I’m able to do have never had much monetary value—teaching, for instance. So I’ve gotten used to living on peanuts.

            Then things gummed up with the writing.

The newspapers I submitted to either shut down or stopped paying me regularly. Newspapers are going the way of the wooly mammoth: Internet and climate change can be lethal.

After I quit a couple of them, I was down to one faithful and true column publisher.

            But when it came to just one newspaper…man, I was really writing for peanuts. So I sent that newspaper my regrets and stopped working on columns.

            Can’t really say I missed it until I started missing it. And that was just recently.

            I still don’t miss trying to come up with something to write about. And I still don’t miss starting with a nothing and trying to end up with a something.

But I do miss having finished a new column that some people wouldn’t mind reading, especially if I like reading it, too. Yes, foremost, I write for myself.

What I do is like a musician noodling around with jazz licks. And a lot of people don’t care for jazz.

And that’s okay. I don’t mind. (I’m an acquired taste that most people don’t bother to acquire.)

 So I’ll just post this stuff on the Internet and leave it at that. No schedule, no money and no agendas, other than pleasing myself all the time and maybe the isolated reader here and there some of the time.

If you’ve got a rainy day and nothing better to do, you can go back a couple years in my blog and look up some of my columns from past years. I plan on re-posting a few of them every once in a while.

I also post a lot of other stuff I like on my blog. All you got to do is scroll down and see Oliphant cartoons, New Yorker cartoons, Late Night jokes, and other detritus with the life span of a fruit fly but preserved in amber on my Google blog…at least until they discontinue that service as well. (Things move quickly out here on the fringe.)

But whatever, be forewarned, it doesn’t and won’t get any better than this.