Today's topic is Steve Crisp, the Raleigh man who is locally semifamous for several things, most notably his loathing of trees and his inclination to drop mortar rounds of invective into any online forum -- just to relieve the tedium of daily life.

But Crisp is most famous for being the living embodiment of the punch line to an old joke: "Brother, I don't think I'd a told that."

The joke involves a tent revival and various confessions of sins, including one particularly vivid transgression that prompts the preacher to utter the punch line. As far as I know, Crisp's sins don't include anything that would reduce a tent revival to a stunned silence. But he's certainly guilty of telling a story about himself that gets that same response.

The tale even has a formal title: "The Steakhouse Incident." You can look it up on Google.

Crisp wrote the story more than nine years ago, and it has attracted steady attention ever since. It resurfaced again a few weeks ago, when somebody posted it on the Raleigh page on craigslist, the online community bulletin board. I won't go into much detail about the story, because (a) it's profoundly scatological, and to describe the tale in anything other than vague terms would surely cost me my job, and (b) my banker has advised me that a job is a good thing for me to have, mortgage-atorily speaking. So I'll say only that "The Steakhouse Incident" offers the reader an explicit, firsthand account of the digestive dangers of too many visits to the buffet table when macaroni and beef is the featured dish.

And that's all I'll say about that.

I can't pretend to have never written anything raw -- my first book, "What the Deaf-Mute Heard," spotlighted an inventive use of smoked oysters, for instance -- but I would never have attached my name to the steakhouse story. I wondered if Crisp now regretted having his name associated with it, so I called him to ask.

I shouldn't have been surprised at his response. Crisp has a long history of bucking convention. After all, he's the guy who appeared before the Raleigh City Council a couple of years ago to decry the evil done by trees, and defend his right to take a chain saw to them. Still, it was startling to hear Crisp say he has "no regrets at all" about having his name forever linked to a poo epic.

In fact, what he feels most is "the sense of pride that comes from knowing that was flat-out good writing," he says.

I'll give him that. "The Steakhouse Incident" has everything found in top-shelf journalism -- vivid writing, clear descriptions, proper grammar and punctuation, no misspellings, etc. And the proof is in the readership. Crisp says he has received 10,000 e-mail messages from people who've read the story.

Everyone is remembered for something, of course. But if I were Crisp, I'd be working on a cure for cancer. Or hunting Osama bin Laden. Or forging a lasting compromise on, say, the stem-cell debate.

Anything to change what, for now, will surely be the first line in his obituary someday: "Steve Crisp, who achieved lasting Internet fame for his 2,300 word account of ...."

I'll stop there. I still have mortgage payments due.