Here are some representative winning essays from our Essay Contest #3:

Gennifer Munoz

I tried to remember how nice it had been a long long time ago, but I couldn’t remember. I honestly could not remember.

This delightful little tidbit of words is obviously the work of a lyrical visionary. It comes from the song “Nine Black Poppies” by The Mountain Goats, which is a piece filled with the lyrical vagueness that is often so characteristic of said lyrical visionaries.

I assume he’s talking about the quality of what used to be his simple American life. Later he says something about how his girlfriend received “a package from the Hunan province” so I think this drastic change was a direct result of this mysterious package. Here’s the way I see it: girl gets an unmarked package from “Hunan Province,” which is really quite a mysterious place in itself. Package turns out to be a pound of opium, part of a ploy by the Chinese government to launch several similar ‘care packages’ to innocent American citizens in an attempt to spark a national addiction crisis and ultimately, the downfall of the United States and a rapidly spreading opium market. His girlfriend sells the large quantity of opium to make in some money to feed her cocaine addiction, but in the end, she ends up addicted to opium as well. So his girlfriend, along with all his friends that she sold to, is an opium addict and he was sad. In summary: the Chinese government ruined his life and now that he’s constantly high on opiates, he can’t remember.

Christopher Urban

One of the best song lyrics I’ve heard in the last month is from a song called “Game of Pricks” by Guided By Voices.

It’s a rockin’ song, but the part that always gets me is:

I’ll climb up on the house/ just to water the trees.

It’s poetic, strange, and also romantic. I should know, because I climbed up on a girl’s roof and took a hose and sprayed the shit out of her pine trees. That’s not a metaphor.

I didn’t really do that.

But I did find that line in the GBV song so inspiring that I wrote a monologue and acted it out in my theater class.
The scene was about a boy who gets caught by his girlfriend on the roof of another girl’s house. The girlfriend tries to shoot him with a crossbow but misses and hits her dog.

I also wrote a short story inspired by the line in the song. The story’s eighteen pages long. It sucks.