workshop 2--neal

"An Excuse to Drink at Tybee" by Neal Brautigan

I loved the humor in this essay! The whole first paragraph is great, and I love this sentence further down on page 1: "I could think about a pirate and, for some reason, easily smell cat urine and moldy old clothes in someone's basement (Same as when I picture Charles Bronson's face Uhhh!)" I loved the different "snapshots" from the day that you give us, like the drunken conversation with the pirate about the Barbary War and the Circle K conversation. On page 3, I thought you could add in some more descriptions of the pirate parade. I found a lot of "underlying" ideas in this batch of workshop essays. In yours, there was this idea of what pirates really are and how our culture chooses to represent them. Like on page 2, I love that you were talking to the white visor lady about modern-day pirates. "'And there are people in Congress who'd call that terrorism!'" Then on page 5, you describe a car with a bumper sticker on it that says "Death to Terrorism." That was really interesting to me. I thought that maybe you could mix that paragraph about the bumper sticker and the ideas expressed in the last couple parargraphs into the other scenes and then end the piece with the next to last crot on page 5: "At the end, the applause was great, as O'Neil asked, 'Is this a great country or what?'" I think that that says it all. Great job!