Welcome to the Sharing Circle

I rarely use this platform to write about myself. It’s so much more interesting to chat about rock stars and records with y’all. But of course, a record collection is inherently autobiographical.

What you listen to (or don’t) is at least one window into who you are. I like to keep that window wide open, to let everything in and out. Sharing is caring.

In that spirit, I thought I’d crack another window here, one that sheds light on my past life.

25 years ago, I was a recent college graduate, an aspiring writer, and a moneyless drain on society…not that I wasn’t good company.

I made a living helping college kids cheat. I freelanced for an array of online companies that sold academic ghostwriting services. It was quite the racket in the days before ChatGPT.

I wrote a few books about it.

Here’s an excerpted glimpse at what a decade in that line of work looks like:

I took entire courses, entire course loads, entire majors, entire degree programs for people, and sometimes on brutal subjects. I’ve forgotten more about Arizona budgetary administration than most people will ever know.

By my best calculation, I wrote a little over 4000 papers. I touched on nearly every academic subject that doesn’t require mathematics. Just to give you an idea of the range, breadth, and randomness represented within those 4000 papers, here’s a tip-of-the-iceberg sampling:

Labor law, air traffic control and healthcare reform; Amnesia, arrhythmia and rheumatoid arthritis; American independence, American expansionism, American multiculturalism, American Beauty, American Idol; Abortion, Abolition, Affirmative action, Adult Education; Boeing, Lockheed, United Defense, the Atomic Bomb and Apocalypse Now.

Anthrax, Poison and Skid Row (not the hair-metal bands); Metallica, Guns N. Roses and Great White (actually the hair-metal bands); Aqua-net, aquaculture and aquarium maintenance; The House of the Rising Son, the Fall of the House of Usher, the current whereabouts of Elvis Presley, Soccer Hooliganism, French imperialism, Forest management; Galileo, Figaro, the Magnificent Seven, the Seven Samurai.

Music appreciation, music production, music piracy and the real, old-timey eye-patch and parrot kind of piracy; Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Where the Wild Things Are; Tribes of the Yanomami, Obama, Osama, the Dalai Lama, the Bahamas, Waikiki, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, the Foreman Grill and Tyson Chicken.

Monday Night Football, Tuesdays with Morrie, Ice Cube’s Friday and Ireland’s Bloody Sunday; Tiger Woods, tectonic plates and the history of surfing; Superintendent career development, Human Resources at Sunoco, stickball, Balzac, Spike Lee, and Cajun cuisine.

The dangers of smoking, the benefits of smoking, the Bulgarian mafia; The Godfather, Sergeant York, a cultural comparison of Croatians and African Americans living in Connecticut; a case study on marketing WD40 in Australia, an examination of the box office performance of Bad Boys II starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence’s Rocking Horse Winner, horse training, train scheduling, time management, managerial competence, sexual impotence, Sex and the City; city planning, planning for corporate mergers, corporate collapses, corporate ethics; ethical monotheism, mononucleosis, monetary policy; Ptolemy, Tutankhamen, Ticonderoga; the Terror War, the War in Iraq, the War on Drugs; Andy Warhol, Jesus, Moses, Allah, Buddha, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, L. Ron Hubbard, Frankenstein, Freud, Jung, Kant, and Wundt.

And again, that’s just a glimpse. I did it for ten years after college. I slept little. I learned a lot.

I’ve long-since renounced my old profession. I share everything I know with educators about student cheating as recompense for my past misdeeds. And I’ve sworn and upheld since that time the promise to use my powers (however modest they may be) only for good.

I wrote on a wild range of subjects back in those days. It had a soundtrack. The soundtrack was just as scattered.