King of Wendey's

Takashi was a Japanese exchange student who was placed in our ninth-grade literature class as a twelfth-grader. His English probably wasn't good enough to properly interpret The Great Gatsby and A Separate Peace, and by "probably" I mean "with absolute fucking certainty". But he was nothing if not entertaining, good for about a half-dozen ESL quips a week. Once, in class, he was asked by the teacher what he did over the weekend, and he replied, with a shit-eating grin on his face, "...smoke pot."

And then he contributed this to society. I don't know the terms of the assignment, but I do know that it birthed an absolute masterpiece of the Engrish language. The piece needs no interpretation; it only demands extraction of the choicest words and phrases, such as "he hayed Wendey's", "French finds and milk shake", "chop his meat and make a burger", and "garbage track". Read on...

Takashi once became enamored of a joke made at his expense, and went about repeating to everyone the sentence "My name is take-a-shit". He then copy-pasted his name, shrunk it to the smallest font and printed it out, creating a shimmering, pointillist techno-concept piece that reminds of a monochromatic Richard Anuszkiewicz.

Comment Sheet

To tide you over, a short little nugget - the author of Butcher and Snow Blanco at it again. Having nabbed a copy of a school comment card, he added absurdist comments for his own class. The actual teacher comment is pretty good, too, if you ever wanted to know what the badly-behaved kids took home to their moms. Text follows below.

Text of the handwritten section:

Name Hxxxxx Hxxxxx Hxxxxx H, Chris
Course Stock Market 101/Juggling/Lamaze

This course is designed to teach the student the dangers of running and operating a vegetarian salad bar on top of a nuclear reactor.
Chris is without doubt an extremely friendly yet clean person. While he has his faults, his shortcomings are great. He scored a perfect $5 on his last test, but he does know that 6.4 equals make-out. He is a dirty little bastard and I am pleased and disgusted to have him in class.

Dissing Kissing

Oh, dear. This is a mess.

A young boy with several future entries in this series, to whom we will refer only by his first name John, spent one study hall brashly reading aloud articles in a women's magazine (presumably Seventeen or some such), which got him into a spot of trouble with the librarian. His punishment was to read and analyze an article from the magazine entitled "Dissing Kissing" and write a report on it. This is what he handed in. Yeah, written in red marker. It's accompanied by the roll call list the librarian stapled to it before handing it on to his teacher (you always know you've got a good one when it has the words "See Me" on it!). I don't know how we managed to wrest this one away from the administration, but I have the original manuscript.

Archival scholars have transliterated John's Sütterlin below the images, to the best of current knowledge on this man's unique script.

Text of the essay:

Thumb in my mouth is about Dissing Kissing is a article about girls who hate kissing, because they dont like it. These girls are [unintelligible] lesbians Femnots who think it b becaue theres is sumthin wrong w/them, which there is. I hate babes like that, and they are probably fat, pimple covered virgins. Get A Life. These girls should be [unintelligible] slores. They should become blonds + have lots of makeout sessions and sex and do lots of drugs party [animals?] 4 life.

Snow Blanco and the Seven Thugs

Another top-shelf submission from the author of Butcher, this synthesis of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Scarface was handed in for a fable-writing project, though I never received word of whether he was reprimanded for it. Note the Jay-Z reference, as well as the fact that all of the stories posted so far would make excellent Jerry Bruckheimer screenplays without changing a single word.

Butcher

It was inevitable that, as the preceding two pieces of literature made their way through the collective consciousness of our social group, someone would pay homage to it in the form of a tribute. The man first up to the task was none other than the great Daniel Francisco Somavilla Snyder Bueno Herrera, whose literary exploits are here unearthed for the first and by no means the last time. A man silver of tongue, golden of wit, and leaden of pipe, he studied Hacker and DOOM intensely, gestating this short story only after months of careful scrutiny of the primary source documents.

Aristophanes, Juvenal, Miguel de Cervantes, and This Is Spinal Tap have all shown us that satire, sufficiently rich and incisive, can rise to the level of great art, equalling or surpassing the works it ridicules. To this list we must add Butcher, which positions itself as a direct sequel to Hacker. The parody distills the essence of Saunders's fractured, zig-zagging prose while also interpolating elements of DOOM's inimitable style. A minor classic in its own right, it is published here unexpurgated except to again omit the name of the author of DOOM, who is credited as a co-writer.

Hacker: An Introduction to Eric Saunders.

The second foundational document is also a product of the vaunted Writer's Workshop classes that were necessary for all middle-school children. But before we take a look at the Odyssey to DOOM's Iliad, let's learn a little about the titan who penned our sophomore masterpiece, who has contributed numerous artifacts to the Archives and who has graciously allowed me to use his real name.

Meet Eric Saunders.

Saunders (as he was invariably known) redefined humor at our educational institution from the day he set foot in it, and likely would have done so for an entire generation, had he been blessed with the right stage. A gangly, wiry kid with unruly blown-back hair and a permanent goofball smile, Saunders drove to school every day in a car with a homemade bumper sticker, a collection of adhesive letters spelling "READ AYN RAND". He was the kind of student Harvard would call "well-lopsided"; something of a mathematical savant, he expressed an early desire to dispense with some of his classes in the humanities in the interest of taking more math and science. No surprise, from a kid whose math SAT score was 230 points higher than his verbal score. His grasp of English (and, as we will see later, Spanish, too) was, as one might expect, occasionally less than perfect, and often to explosively funny ends. He was a perennial generator of malapropisms and he frequently misunderstood or misinterpreted normal conversation, to a degree where he was virtually impossible to talk to for five minutes without some sort of hysterical communication breakdown ensuing.

It was so common that any mangling of the English language became known as a "Saunders", even when other people did it. Naturally, an archive of these occurrences, known as "The Saunders List", was created, and ran some fifteen pages; unfortunately, there are no extant copies. (If anyone knows the whereabouts of a facsimile or computer file of this great lost document, please contact me at once!)

He walked the hallways of high school a minor legend, his nuggets of inadvertent hilarity woven deep into the argot of his friends as well as classmates who barely knew him. Despite his professed preference for the hard sciences, he was nevertheless, like all secondary-school pupils, required to write, and one of his fiction assignments found its way into the hands of his friends after a peer review. A sui generis gem, Hacker somehow (as though tapping from a collective unconscious of linguistic insight) echoes the setting and sentiments of DOOM, while at the same time achieving pathbreaking levels of literary incompetence.

The story centers around John Jay Jackson, who lives a miserable existence in a Harlem apartment with no heat, "afraid to go outside because of all the gangs and thugs outside". He hears a crime being committed somewhere else in the building, but, in a noirish twist, refuses to cooperate with the police in the paranoiac belief that they might finger him as the culprit. He escapes, Orson Welles-like, through the sewer system to "a secret room in Grungies Bar that even the owner did not know about it."

He immediately leaves the safe house, then returns to it, then leaves again, and buys "a nice flame red sports car", in which he sits and deliberates for an hour before heading to "Wagon town in western Colorado" at a brisk 110 mph (177 km/h). Stopping at a convenience store on the way, he finds he's already being featured on America's Most Wanted, and after another harrowingly close brush with John Q. Law, he makes for a Motel 6 to spend the night, plugging in his "lap top" in the only sentence that could conceivably justify the story's title.

At this point, we encounter John Hawk, the detective who's hot on John Jay Jackson's tail. Intent on finding his man, he "ordered that every hotel to the west of Denver be examined". Soon enough he accumulates some hard evidence on Jackson's whereabouts, which "made Hawk go wild"; Jackson buys a new house (on Falcon Street; note the ornithological symbolism at work here) and has his car painted blue, but that doesn't stop the detective from following his tracks.

The denouement is riveting, but it wouldn't do to spoil the heart-stopping, grammatically illogical conclusion. Read on, readers.

DOOM: The One That Started It All.

To a twelve-year-old mind, it was the stuff of genius. A fiction assignment, a short story, to be typed on the computer lab's Macintosh IIs during Writer's Workshop class...with a wholly unprecedented twist the teacher would surely never see coming. A retelling of the plot of the then-popular first-person shooter video game DOOM...with the author himself as the main character!

Part of what made this choice so daring is the fact that DOOM had almost no plot to begin with. The storyline is straight out of a Sylvester Jean-Claude van Seagalnegger film: You're a marine in a military base on a Mars moon, attempting to single-handedly fight off an invasion of Hellspawn. You do this by running around and shooting everything, moving to the next level, and running around and shooting everything again. It's hard to structure a significant narrative out of this thematic material, but that didn't stop our precocious young writer from embarking on his postmodern experiment. He quickly dispatched two pages and sent them in for the review of the first draft.

It's common for pedestrian educators to be incapable of recognizing true creative talent in their students, and this paper was no exception, with scads of markup "correcting" his unconventional grammatical, punctuation, and page-formatting structures, as well as a stern warning to "remove!" stunningly graphic content the Puritanical administration no doubt found noxious to their delicate sensibilities.

How could they recognize the sheer intrepidity of the raw, unbridled prose?  The originality of opening the story with a line about a stormy night in a town called....Whitehall? The foreshadowing of the author's own impending encounter with girls? (That section drawn from the vicissitudes of real life, no doubt...) The (literal) bang-bang action that perforates the scene within sentences? The fact that almost half the first page is written in CAPS LOCK? The keen blurring of protagonist and auxiliary characters through the repetition of the word "man"? The curious invention of a "gauge shotgun" with an incredible 250-shell capacity? The Beckettian dialogue between the narrator and his comrade? The amazing Shyamalanian reveal at the piece's conclusion, that it was all a dream...Or Was It? Certainly, the labyrinthine complexity of this piece will have literary scholars debating for decades.

Serendipity sometimes brings us our most treasured keepsakes, as is the case here: the author left the marked copy of the first draft in the computer lab, where it was discovered by a classmate and immediately disseminated to everyone in the common areas. It became an instant classic, laughed at by legion and inadvertently inspiring a new catchphrase throughout the school: "DOOM!" became the default substitute word for any unfortunate mishap, troubling prediction, poor performance, or colossal failure. You will see the word repeated many times in future postings, as it made its way into (or onto) papers, quizzes and tests of students who knew before time was up that their grades were sinking right before their eyes.

But no critical analysis can replace a study of the actual source material. Here it is, complete and unabridged, unedited except to remove the name of the author, whose august brilliance must shine forth anonymously. And so, I present to you, in its entirety...DOOM.

The Mission Statement

In 1993, I began attending a small private middle school in the mid-Atlantic states, remaining a student there through high school graduation. To this day, I look back upon those years with amazement at the quality and diversity of character in the students I encountered there. I met boys and girls (who grew up to be men and women before my eyes) of prodigious intelligence, restless curiosity, sharp acumen, and wily wit. They remain some of the most perceptive and intellectually impressive people I have ever met in my life.

But not everyone can be on point every shot, every game, every day. Once in a while, somebody throws up an airball.

As fate had it, in seventh grade, I happened upon one or two of these airballs by chance. A few assignments and papers written and submitted by some of my fellow classmates, which were, let's say, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time, were passed on to me, sometimes before grading, and sometimes afterwards. They were hilarious, and not necessarily always, or entirely, intentionally so. They became the stuff of legend, with copies passed down the hallways to any student looking for a good laugh. Far from becoming embarrassments, their authors became celebrities, sharing in the mirth and reveling in their status as in-house memes, before we even knew what a "meme" was.

Soon, students began submitting to me their own worst work, and I started an impromptu archives to collate and preserve these gems of (literally) sophomoric humor. It grew to fill an entire binder, which traveled with me as I moved on to college far away, tucked in boxes in closets in apartment after apartment. Once in a while, I'd pull them out for a new crowd and we'd page through each fading leaf, and they never failed to leave my new acquaintances in stitches, even though they'd never met the tremendous personalities that had birthed these priceless treasures in the first place. Who says humor isn't universal?

More than ten years have passed since the last of the Archives had been filed away, and I've bit my nails many a time over the possibility that they might perish in a moving accident, fire, or flood. But they have persevered, and now, technology, time, and financial resources have conspired to offer the opportunity to both digitally preserve the Archive (through a home scanner) and present it to a wider audience (through this weblog). The project shall be completed when the entire contents of the Archive have been scanned and made available to posterity; naturally, the paper copies will be retained, but the ravages of time and circumstance are ever unpredictable, and in the event of disaster, this may be the only chance we have of making a permanent record of them.

Ladies and gentlemen....behold.