Trenton Ray, a Brownwood native and resident, died the other day. This isn’t an obituary, it’s a true story. And it’s a memorial. I didn’t know Trenton very well. I don’t even know if his family and friends called him “Trent” or “Trenton” or something else entirely. I knew him by about three different names, and most of them were “nom de plumes” (pen names.)

I never met him face to face (that I know of,) but we chatted a bit on Facebook, and our relationship was interesting enough for me to write about.

By all accounts, Trenton was an interesting guy. A character. When the Brownwood News posted his obituary, his friends, co-workers, and associates had great things to say about him – generally mentioning his gentleness, kindness, helpfulness, and humor. Those are great tributes, and I have to say I wish I’d gotten to know the man better. How we came to become chat-friends is a story interesting enough that I hope you will take the time to read it.

Mr. Ray was very helpful – almost everyone says that – and he was thanked by friends of the Greenleaf Cemetery for his volunteer work. It is said that his work there at the cemetery lives on after him, helping Veterans locate their family members who have been buried at Greenleaf. That’s a great testimony, right there.

How I met Trenton is a little crazy and interesting.

A year or so ago a funny little satire page appeared on Facebook. Like many classic social media parody pages, this one pretended to be an online “news” source, but it was quite obviously parody and satire. Like the Babylon Bee, but for Brownwood.

Let me back up a bit. I’ve been using my Facebook page (go check it out and follow me!) for humor, jokes, satire, etc. since 2009. I have a pretty extensive following there, and I try to make people laugh at least once a day. My humor is very peculiar, not for everyone, mainly focusing on irony and absurdity. I like to think that my jokes are multi-layered, definitely deadpan, and sometimes people either don’t get the jokes, or they don’t understand irony. The point that makes this relevant to our subject is this: I write for the newspaper in Brownwood and I use my Facebook page to post jokes mostly.

Those two things are what is important… newspaper and jokes.

So, when a parody online newspaper appeared on Facebook called “The Brownwood Times New Roman” some people thought I was the one behind it.

I had no idea who was behind this new satire page. Once people started asking me about it, I began reading the almost daily posts. Sometimes the posts were very funny. Sometimes they were a little sharp and barbed. But one thing was certain… some people thought “Brownwood Times New Roman” was me!

I didn’t want that because I have two rules for my social media presence:

• I always post under my own, real name. No pen names for me.
• I never use AI to write my material.

All of that will come into play very soon in our story…

I supported someone doing this and having fun with it, but I didn’t want anyone to think it was me. Not because it wasn’t good or funny, but because it wasn’t “on brand” for me. The humor was different. The writing was different. And I applaud those things.

Soon people started messaging me or stopping me downtown and asking me if I was writing the Brownwood Times New Roman, or if I knew who it was. I had no idea who it was, but soon I got a private message from Trenton. He told me he’d been reading my stuff for some time, that he admired me, that he wanted to be a writer, and that he wanted to pick my brain from time to time so that he could learn. He told me he’d started the Brownwood Times New Roman because he wanted to make a go at doing some form of humor writing and he hoped to learn from me.

He let me know that he loved Brownwood, but he considered a lot of people in Brownwood to be hypocritical stuffed shirts and he liked to take shots that occasionally rubbed people the wrong way. That’s my way of saying that sometimes his articles pissed people off.

He reminded me of a historical character named “Brann the Iconoclast.” William Cowper Brann was a satire/parody writer in Waco in the late 1890s who went to war with Baylor (the university) and got killed over it. Not many people would have made that connection, but I read a lot of Brann and found him to be a fascinating guy. If you get the opportunity, go on over to Wikipedia and type in William Cowper Brann and read about him. They should make a movie about his life. Brann wrote angry, cutting, biting satire and comedic bits about many targets, and he made a lot of people angry. He is famous for saying this about the Baylor Baptists:

“I have nothing against the Baptists, I just believe they weren’t held under long enough.”

Brann was an absolutely fascinating man, and it is a great compliment that I am comparing Trenton Ray with Brann.

Sometimes Trenton’s journalistic bits were authentically humorous, well-written, and dead-on point. He wrote about things only Brownwood insiders would know about, and sometimes transplants like me probably didn’t get the joke because we haven’t lived here long enough.

I was in a bit of a quandary. I always want to encourage anyone with a dream, and I liked the idea of a good parody/satire page about Brownwood – even if it pissed people off. I was chatting with Trenton, trying to help him with advice here and there, and I didn’t even know who he was. His identity was a mystery to me. Also, some people still believed that I was the one writing the articles!

My quandary multiplied because, as time went by, I discovered that he was using AI to write a good portion of his articles. Nothing wrong with that if that’s what someone wants to do, but it is something that I would never do.

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. Only “they” don’t say that much anymore, and when that quotation first evolved, it was more of an insult than a plain statement of fact. I won’t get into the long history of the evolution of that quote, but the iteration of it that is used most often is this…

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity pays to genius.”

I don’t think Trenton was mediocre. I thought he was very funny, and he was learning and developing a talent he sincerely wanted to exercise and grow. I had been a fan of Brann, and I could see Trenton developing into a Brann-like iconoclast.

The thing is that Brann entertained and he enraged. And he paid dearly for his art. He was kidnapped by students, beaten on the streets by a Baptist judge, and he eventually died in a shootout with someone really angry about Brann’s treatment of Baylor. It’s a true story, and crazy as hell.

And then, with Trenton, there was the AI thing…

One day I posted on Facebook that I didn’t believe in using AI to write my jokes, posts, or articles. Trenton messaged me almost immediately – and this is how you know that he was a genuine guy who cared about what he was doing and who wanted to do it well.

“I appreciate you writing that,” he wrote, “I’ve gotten a little stale and lazy. I started using ChatGPT to write my articles. My problem is that there is a limited number of things I can write about in Brownwood. I was running out of material, and I just got lazy. I appreciate you saying something. I want to change things up and do better. I’m not going to use AI anymore.”

His next move, he told me, was to broaden his scope. He planned to close down Brownwood Times New Roman and go statewide. He was dreaming big. His next parody page was called TEXAS COMIC SANS.

But other than a post or two, that dream never happened.

Almost immediately, things started happening in his life that I was not privy to. He had difficulties, healthwise and otherwise. The next time I heard from him privately, he was in a hospital in Abilene. I won’t write about any of that stuff because I don’t know enough about it, and I really want to limit this article to what I know.

What do I know? I’m not sure I ever met Trenton face-to-face. I did develop a very short, almost mentor-like relationship with him and I appreciated his sincerity, his humor, and his desire to work at something that made him happy. I appreciated his brave disregard for whether or not he pissed people off.

When I read that Trenton died, I wanted to share this story because it is not often you meet people who are authentically themselves. By that I mean… people who are characters, and who see the value in jokes and laughter. Trenton made me laugh, and that’s a testimony to him too.

I believe that Brownwood is famous, and should be even more famous, for the people who have written here. The history of literature of all kinds runs deep and wide here. Brownwood neglects its writers, historic and modern, almost maniacally. We support all the other arts – the transient ones that are pleasant but will never be a part of Brownwood’s heritage. And Brownwood had its own fiery Brann the Iconoclast. Trenton Ray wanted to be a writer, and he made a go at it, and that’s cool with me.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.