What am I doing here? Who am I fooling? How big a fraud am I, anyway?

Here I am, planted cheekily in the Smoky Mountain News’ Arts & Entertainment section, spewing my weekly dose of hot air and bombast, and with what authority? I don’t watch TV. I don’t go to movies. I don’t read Rolling Stone or Vibe or Spin or Mojo or Maxim or Wired. I couldn’t tell Ashlee and Jessica Simpson apart if they got in a rake fight in my living room — although I could probably sell tickets — and while I hear the name Lindsay Lohan now and then, I’m never sure if she’s a poet, a porn star, or that girl from my ninth-grade geometry class with the braces, boot-cuts, and the daddy in jail for holding up the liquor store.

I do read the occasional book, it’s true, and listen to enough music to clog up my ears, but I hardly have my finger on the pulse of the planet, or even of the mountains. Some days, I can scarcely find my own pulse. (It’s right there, I tell myself, somewhere below your sandwich ....) My pop culture license hasn’t been renewed since, oh, 1986. And yet I pass myself off as your A&E columnist.

My latest brush with my own pitiful ignorance — and believe me, I have plenty of brushes with my own pitiful ignorance — came when I read Entertainment Weekly’s “Best of 2004” issue. It made about as much sense to me as tax law. Prominent in those pages were six Top 10 lists, listing EW’s favorite movies, DVDs, television shows, albums, fiction, and nonfiction from 2004. Sixty pop-cultural treasures in all. I was familiar with precisely three of them. One was a movie “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and two were television shows “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons.” The other 57 were things that I might have heard of — through magazines, newspapers, or conversations with savvier friends — but had not personally laid eyes, ears, or paws upon.

And so I write about other things. I’ve been filling this space for a year now — this is A&E column number 53 — and in that time I’ve seen fit to write about dog breeds, dishwasher detergent, energy drinks, Abu Ghraib, election returns, pike-strafing, SUVs, Smokey the Bear, and the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the president of Indonesia. Oh sure, there was the occasional bit about poetry, music, and film, but never once did I find time to single out “Fear Factor,” Donald Trump, or Dizzee Rascal for the attention they so richly deserve.

I’m sure SMN’s Grand Poobah Scott McLeod has considered cutting my column: he could use the money he saves each week to buy something , like a pack of coffee filters, a tire gauge or perhaps a donut.

But not all three.

So instead I remain, committed to bringing you poor jokes, useless information, and a fair share of high-holy windbaggin’ from atop my editorial perch. I’ll occasionally dip into Arts & Entertainment, particularly if there are serrano peppers, cold beer, or a Dixieland tuba line involved. Other than that, there’s no tellin’.

What am I doing here? Who am I fooling? How big a fraud am I, anyway?

Dunno. Nobody. Quite big.

And I’m back for more.

(Jay Hardwig can be reached at smardwig@charter.net.)