April 19, 2003 (idea)

The letter that follows is of a highly personal nature. I wrote it this evening only to find, to my complete dismay, that the email address is no longer in service. I hand it to all of you. Please, give me something that inspires.

Hello Mr. -----,

Well, I'm curious as to whether this email address is even still in service, but what the hell; I'll give it a try. I'm sitting at home for Easter break right now and I was flipping through my old desk. In my searches I managed to come across my folder of creative writing assignments from 1998. Ahhhhhh, was I ever that young?

Truth be told, I'm pretty amazed that some of those thoughts ever managed to creep their way onto paper from my meandering thoughts. I couldn't imagine a single ink drop of those stories flowing from my mind these days. Perhaps my intense cynicism has gotten the best of me, or maybe 5 years of technical cramming has eliminated my capacity for free-form thought. The bottom line is I feel like a fucking robot.

Well, in the interest of my personal sanity or perhaps insanity, I've decided to attend law school. I managed a pretty sweet deal at Duke by pulling a lucky LSAT score. I guess I always did pretty well on the tests; I liked the competition of that stuff. I'm hoping I can find something to be passionate about.

I'm actually writing write now for a number of different reasons. One of them is that I felt you were the best teacher I had in high school and I feel terribly guilty that I didn't stay in touch. Another is that reading those papers made me wish that I was capable of those ridiculous thoughts that I once wrote about. I'm basically feeling like a drone and I'm looking for something to snap me out of this. I was hoping you could recommend some provocative, worthwhile books that I could read. My reading has been limited to Stephen King and shitty texts ever since I graduated high school. My writing has been all technical and requires minimal original thought. Shit, it took me about 30 seconds to grasp the word "original."

Anyways, I'm hoping you still check your email. Perhaps you've retired to a cave somewhere to raise a small litter of pigs to live in your image. You may have sworn off technology too. I hope not, because it would be great to hear back.