The Newsletter
Last Fall, along with my erstwhile friends Mike "Uncle Jerry" Alber and Jim "The Plate" Platte, I founded The Newsletter. The idea came, as most good ideas do, from an episode of The Simpsons; Homer says to Bart, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." We think our ideas are intriguing; so, we signed our friends up for The Newsletter. Vol. I, No. 1 was two pages; our columns were just a declaration of purpose, what we hoped to accomplish with them. For Vol. I, No. 2, we added Brad Dupay, and expanded to three pages. By Vol. I, No. 3, we hit four pages and this has since become standard. Each issue is photocopied onto a piece of 17"x11" paper, double-sided, then folded in half, stuffed into a letter-sized envelope, and mailed off. We've recently devised a method to steal copies; so, our only expense is postage. Each issue is theoretically available at The Newsletter Online, but Jim has fallen behind and the site hasn't been updated since January.

Now, Mike is planning on quitting. He says it isn't fun anymore. How that can be, I have no idea, but if that is how he feels, I won't try to stop him from leaving. I pity him, really. Mike is the most talented writer I know, in addition to being a fantastic artist and a truly hilarious human being. But, instead of doing something with those talents, Mike just likes to watch TV. (Listen, we all love SportsCenter, but Mike has been known to watch the same episode three or four times in a row.) Really, that's pretty much all he does, watch TV and play video games. By himself. And I'm not just upset that Mike doesn't want to be part of The Newsletter anymore (if anything, since the new year he's been less than half-assing it and hurting the rest of us); it just infuriates me to see so much potential going to waste. With his howntown friend Gabe, Mike has written a first draft of a screenplay. A full-length, professional-formatted screenplay. I've read it. It's hilarious. Yet, Mike isn't doing anything about revising it. He knows there are areas where it should be stronger, and he even knows how to make those areas stronger, but doing so would seriously cut into his heavy schedule of sloth-imitating. Damn it, Mike, how in the hell can you just give up on yourself like this?!

(True, if I had his girlfriend, I'd be miserable, too, but she's a noose with which he's hung himself. The poor bastard's even convinced he wants to propose to her and I have no doubt they will get married. It's really too bad Mike doesn't drink, because he could use a nice, stiff shot.)

Adding insult to injury, before he goes Mike is trying to convince Jim that nobody cares about The Newsletter. That may very well be true, but Jim is a melancholy kind of guy anyway, and telling him that is just plain cruel. It's bad scene, which, I'm becoming more and more convinced, is the nature of Ann Arbor. It's just a bad scene, man, and if you aren't careful, it'll eat you alive.