Wednesday, May 30, 2007

An email

I got an email from a friend of the forwarded joke variety. It read:

"As I was reading this I was anticipating sending it to you. I was thinking 'This is SO Maht!' Then I got to the signature at the bottom and it made me laugh!"

The signature was my own. I had written the thing. I wrote it for this very blog, in fact, last September, before most of you ever came by to say hello. It was my complaint letter to the Starbucks Overlord.

You can read it here. It's a bit better than I remembered it being, although not very polished.

It is a strange thing to be forwarded your own work. I felt my soul split in two. I looked at my hand and it faded away, exactly in the manner of Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. Would she have sent it if the signature had fallen off? I suspect that she would have, and that would have been stranger still, if it had come saying "here's something you might find amusing" with no knowledge of its creation.

I am fine now, of course. Such frissons are never permanent.

7 comments:

basest said...

I actually had read this before, when I first stumbled onto your blog, but it was worth re-reading today. I love the line "even the most volatile ones only explode when provoked". I think i want that on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.

thailandchani said...

That must be a creepy sensation to have your own words come back to you in such a way. :)


Peace,

~Chani

heartinsanfrancisco said...

Great letter!!

And I think that if my own words came back to me in that manner, I would feel kind of violated. Flattered would possibly follow, or not.

I don't like Starbucks coffee and find it much too bitter, even though I use excessive amounts of cream but no sugar in my coffee from any vendor.

My only ventures into one of their ubiquitous stores recently were in L.A. in service to my daughter, who is a user of their drugs.

I much prefer individual coffee shops myself.

The Moon Topples said...

Basest: Thanks for reading twice (and Happy Birthday to your son). I look forward to doing a blog post about being behind a car in traffic with something I'd written on its bumper.

TC: Welcome! I was flattered mostly, since it was sent intact, and included the attribution. I would have been pretty weirded out had it been edited or attributed to someone else.

HinSF: Yup, I prefer the individual shops myself. We don;t even have a Starbucks within a couple of miles, which suits me just fine.

Unknown said...

I think I might be a little flattered if an email came back to me. It has been floating around the interweb, entertaining folk for all this time - I think that's quite cool.

Concerning the letter itself - I don't think you asked for enough 'free things', exploding coffee cans could be potentially lethal.
I once found a cockroach (supersize) in a bunch of bananas. I was told that it was dead (I knew that - gassed I believe) and there was nothing to worry about. I raised an eyebrow and muttered the word 'press' and 'very interested' and wine, chocolates, more fruit, fancy breads and cheeses and other things I can;t afford suddenly appeared as if by magick.

Unknown said...

Yeah, I think Minx might be on to something. Not content with doing small coffee shops out of Business I see that Starbucks are moving into selling extortionate CD's nowadays.
Glad your hand has reappeared, otherwise it would have been quite tricky doing this post.

Nikki Neurotic said...

It's odd how things published on the web end up coming full circle like that...you'd think that since the web is so massive it would be physically impossible...like spending a dollar bill in a big city. You don't expect to ever see that particular dollar bill again.