I have borrowed two images from Graham Greene. The first, hunting roaches, is a metaphor for attacking my own failures as a scholar. The second becomes a subtitle for this attempt to summarize a sorting of my academic life. I first explain why I have rejected autobiography, autoethnography, and mystory in favor of using Greene’s "sort of life" as a way of structuring my scrappy academic experiences. I then use another set of apparently frivolous metaphors to organize the reflective telling of my sort of academic life. These metaphors or processes are presented as a series of life phases: scrabbling, scribbling, scribing, and scrubbing. They are interrupted by a separate "doing nothing" phase, which is a commentary on a chronic case of writer’s block. Finally, I reflect on two more hopeful phases of my sort of life that I identify as usefully "frivolous" and fruitfully "post-academic."