The summer after my freshman year, I worked in a factory.  The work was hard, and the days were long.  It was not so much the hard work which got to me -- after enough time, your body gets used to it.  What got to me was that there was nowhere for the mind to go.  In boredom, my mind would start composing wonderful ideas for stories and poems, but when I got home, I was too tired to do any work on them.  It was all I could do to send out my frustrations on this -- and on anything else for that matter -- in my irregular emails to my friends at school.  This was before I started sending them out on a solely weekly basis -- I just sent them out whenever I wanted to generate contact, which was often.  This was probably my most bitter of seasons, or my most depressed.  There was a bright point, and that is that this was the summer that I had my Eagle ceremony (I had been an Eagle Scout for nearly two years, but just had not had the chance to have my ceremony.  Anyway, not all of the letters from this time have survived, because I did not send these to Mum, who has proven to be an admirable anthologizer.

Due to my nature this season, not a lot of what I had to say was funny, or even interesting.  I have still included it, though, just to make the archives complete.
The Proto-Season:
Letters from the Factory Summer
Summer 2001
from A wee bit of vanity
July 5th, 2001

There's something that really annoys me, and I must get it off my chest.  It is, of course, my shirt.  Seriously, Baby Talk bugs the becrap out of me.
     "Gooby gooby gooby" doesn't bother me at all, neither do the strange acrobatics people do with their ptich levels when they speak to the little minipeople.  NO, there is a specific part of Baby Talk that dives into my spine and noogies my nerves, and that is as follows:  Oh look at her!  Her's so cute!  Her's hungry!

Gerhefnefield Ambisiduloskidrov:  Hi, I'm Jeff's leprechaun, or more exactly, I'm the leprechaun assigned to Jeff.  Normally, I just show up to insult Jeff and hit him in the head, but on this I have to agree with him.  However, I can't disappoint all my fans who have sent for Special Collectors' Edition Gershefnefield "Babe" Ambisiduloskidrov Autographed Trading Cards, so --

*THWAP*

     OW!
     Well, anyway, , I think Mr. Ben Utter has the best idea of avoiding Baby Talk, and that is to have a vlasectomy.

     A man goes to the doctor's office and says, "Sir, I think I want to have a vlasectomy."  The doctor, being a man himself, would, for sympathy's sake, like to avoid this operation, so he says, "Are you sure, sir?  It is, after all, a serious operation.  I suggest you discuss it with your family first."  "Oh, says the man, "I have, and we're in favor: twenty-six to nine."

GA:  I was just -- what?  (Looks at name)  Oh, so now we're abbreviating!  {incoherent, probably profane mumbling}  I just wanted to say that I liked that joke.  Book signing tour coming up--

*THWAP*

     OW!
     Frickin' leprechaun.
     Well, I had a couple of other thigns that annoy me, and I was going to take great delight in lambasting them for you, but I can't remember either of them.  One of them had somethind to do with billboards, I think.


Postscript: An anagram for Ben Utter is "Beer Nutt."  I think that's cool.

Commentary:  This isn't the first surviving email -- just the first one with anything remotely entertaining in it.  Note that I had to explain Gershefnefield Ambisiduloskidrov on it.  Goes to show how early this was.  Also, this is when I started calling my good buddy Ben Utter "Beer Nutt."  Quite an event, I must say!
from Wherein Phileas Fogg realizes only Passporteau has a stupider name
July 26, 2004

Waz(greeting cut for length)

     We've got some new people receiving these press releases of mine.  Yes, I know what all you old timers are thinking:  "Oh no!  Nobody's safe!"
     I was chanel surfing (it's hard to catch a good wave on a perfume ocean) and I came across a commercial for "Big Brother 2."  I imagine that socialist Eric Arthur Blair (also known as George Orwell) is spinning -- with delight -- knowing that a character from his enduring anti-Utopian satire has become a titular allusion for a voyeuristic captialist ploy.
     Also, I have found it quite interesting that to celebrate their new movie, Atlantis, Disney had sister corporation McDonald's push a meal that is most suggestive of the film.  No, it had nothing to do with fish, that would be too obvious.  What better represents the age-old legend of the Lost Continent than a sandwich parents have been making to feed their more finicky children ever since the microwave was invented -- the Hot Ham and Cheese.  I mean, c'mon!  This doesn't even have any special sauce or even an interesting bun!  Is this really something you have to go out to eat?
     Well, I just finished two more stories:  "The Perfectly Sane Dialogues," a Durmond story, and "Depression and Other Goals," a weak attempt at humor.
     I am quite bored.  I'm in between stories.  I"d been writing "The Perfectly Sane Dialogues" for three days.  Actually, the story is much older.


Commentary:  Here was an attempt at humor.  The bit about stories I'd been writing -- that was a running thread during that summer.  I had a list of goals I was going to accomplish, writing wise, and so I would keep my readers up to date on how I was doing.  I've cut this out of most of the emails I'm putting up, but I included it here since it mentions "The Perfectly Sane Dialogues," a short story which later went on to become my award winning play of the same title.
Gosh.  That's it.  Kind of a waste of time, actually.  I'm sorry to have bothered you.
-- The EHM
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