DO NOT READ ME!!!

I suppose it wouldn’t be asking too much if you just stopped reading this very second. I wish I could come up with a less enticing way for you to continue past the title. Looking back at it, I guess that title is a bit tempting. But anything else I come up with would be too much of a risk, and I just can’t have everyone reading this. I just can’t. How rude of me. Here I am, ranting on and on, and you have no idea what I am talking about.

My story begins in 1938. I was a struggling writer trying to gather my thoughts and transform them from an amorphous blob into beautiful prose. Of course, I also figured it would get me in good with the ladies. My first attempt at writing was the world of novels, but I didn’t have the intellect or the attention span. Then, I decided to try my hand at epic poems. However, I was never good at rhyming or iambic pentameters. Plays were interesting, but I couldn’t stand actors. Short stories and sonnets… not my cup of tea.

The blues was a big thing at that time and showed no signs of slowing in its popularity. Logic would dictate that writing songs would be lucrative both personally and professionally. But as luck would have it, I was tone deaf and couldn’t learn to play an instrument anyway. However, in my futile attempt to be a musician and songwriter, I learned of someone who may help me. I was told to meet him at the Dockery Plantation in Mississippi where I was staying at the time.

He dressed in the nicest suit, made possibly out of silk. His shoes were so smooth and glossy; you’d think it was carved out of pure ivory. Despite the blistering sun and parched air refuse to perspire a single bead of sweat. The oddest thing was that the air smelled of burnt cherry wood. I was told to bring a fountain pen… an empty fountain pen.

“What do you desire, young man?” he asked me with a voice that was all at once smooth, gravelly, and so full of charm.

“I want to be a writer,” I coyly replied, “No, I want to be immortalized in words. I’ve tried so hard, beckoned and beseeched dozens of muses and still: inspiration and talent still elude me.”

“Hand me the pen,” he instructed. I took out the only fountain pen I owned, empty as instructed, and the well-dressed man palmed it in his gigantic hand.

From inside his coat pocket, the mysterious man took out what seemed to be an empty inkwell. As he took the lid off, the well seemed to glow with a small fire. “A neat trick,” I thought in all my glorious naiveté. He “filled” the fountain pen with his flame-ink and handed it back to me. The pen was cool to the touch and was weighted as if actually filled with ink. He told me all I had to do was touch the pen to paper and my wish would be fulfilled: to be “immortalized in words.”

I walked home that night and no sooner did I take my third step from the man, an idea popped in my head for the greatest story ever told since the days of Moses. I turned around to tell the man in the nice suit and he had disappeared. All that remained in his place was air and wisps of dust climbing into the air. I ran the rest of the way and took out some paper. As soon as the nib touched the pen, there was a blinding flash. And that’s how I ended up as words on this page.

I should have known that I was making a deal with the devil, but my eyes were just too large for my stomach to handle. If I were a better writer I would have come up with a less cliché metaphor. That’s the irony of it, isn’t it? Shortly after the blinding flash, the well-dressed man walked into the room and explained the mechanics of the whole ordeal. There is a way out of it, two actually.

My wish was to be “immortalized in words.” So I’m immortal… and stuck as the words that you see before you on the page. The first and possibly most effective way to get me out of this situation is to not read me at all. But I think it’s safe to assume that that is no longer an option this far into the game. Perhaps I’ll be okay if you place me in a Los Angeles bookstore. But I digress. The second way, and perhaps most torturously Faustian, is for you to lose interest and never reach the end of this. So I beg you to please stop reading… now… please? How about NOW?

You see, the terrible thing about the second option is that if I were a better writer, I’d get you to read forever. But alas, I have no such talent. I can only hope that some unwitting jackass does not post this on the internet. I appreciate the company, however, I do. And if it’s not too much trouble, please, do not pass this on.