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.