Learning to See in the Dark

There exists in Santa Barbara a certain man who, along with a handful of associates, sends periodic email blasts to a scattered collection of journalists, politicos, and other muckedy-mucks throughout the city. These emails are always addressed to someone — and, really, I wonder sometimes if the addressed or responding parties are actually extant people and not simply voices in his head or fictional characters created for the elaborate email-based performance art that is his life’s work — but they also get sent to about two hundred people who appear to be not involved in the subject at hand in any way whatsoever. I am one of these fortunate people and I, as a result of a curiosity for all things bizarre and sad, have not blocked any of the involved email addresses.

I couldn’t tell you what’s going on, as far as story arcs are concerned. I actually only read through one out of every three or four, so the process of summing up would be about as hard as explaining a late-in-series episode of Twin Peaks which you only watched half of and, also, was in Finnish. But the beauty of these emails, much as with Twin Peaks, is that a person can still manage to find a base level of entertainment even when he or she might be utterly confused about the context of a given bizarre statement, audacious claim or screwball, homeless-guy-on-street-corner assertion.

For example, the following image represents the conclusion of the most recent letter. These four lines constitute the best ending to not only any letter I have ever read but also any letter that has ever been written in the history of epistolary communication.

I’ve blocked out his name, though I’m not sure why, as he clearly has no objections to putting himself under public scrutiny.