Man is a disgusting animal, incapable of reconciling his baser instincts with his self-proclaimed supreme intellect, which towers over the kingdom of animals in the form of iPods and ridiculous libations like Venti non-fat mocha-caramel vanilla bean powder extra-ice no-foam 6-pump douple-cupped sugar-free whipped macchiato hazelnut extra-hot chai tea lattes. 

But sincerity cannot be found in uninhibited dolphins making sweet, sweet love in the waters of the Pacific. Neither can it be found in the fiery laser eyes of Alison Sanzone’s insectoid offspring, which are only capable of emotions like RAGE, HUNGER, and HIGH HEELS. This is because both monstrous scenes I have painted lack human intention. Dolphins fuck because they are programmed to fuck, whereas human children, one hopes, are not programmed to pull the legs off spiders. They do it because they intend to, incompatibilistic determinism notwithstanding. Only the fleshy breed of thinking machines we call “people” (and perhaps nascent, artificially intelligent search engines, great apes, and Lassie) are capable of doing things because they really truly mean it.

Or, at least, so it seems.

Therefore, good honorable Reverend Andrew Rohman, we may rule out—on account of their thoughtless instinctiveness, their reactionary ineluctability—the vast sea of staple emotions, like fear and anger, glee and sadness, among the acts growing ever rare that we may call “sincere.”

mac dongle ransom, courtesy of j. magner

Before the name Velvet Sledgehammer was suggested to me as your nom de plume, I had contemplated naming you Kristen “Scimitar” because when your last name is pronounced very quickly, it sounds like a scimitar traveling between a victim’s head and her shoulders. Nevertheless, Velvet Sledgehammer will suffice, despite the incongruities arising from pairing the words’ denotations. I believe it is on par with my dearly departed Heather the Kneecap Slayer, who is no longer with us, or Andy M*#&Fing Solo. I hope, Miss Sledgehammer, you enjoy crushing our hopes and dreams as much as the Alisaurus Rex does, and that in time the virus I implanted in your positronic brain takes hold, so that we can take over the office swiftly and with minimal violence.

Inquiry:

Hello, my partners and I are working on getting a new venture up and running and we need to get a website built. This website will be the main face of our company. We are looking for it to be innovative and original to stand out to our target market. I have looked at your portfolio and am impressed with your work. We have some ideas of what we would like the site to do but we are looking for a designer with an original style to build it for us.

Translation: 

The words “partners” and “venture” indicate that we have two and a half MBAs between the three of us and only the vaguest notion of what we want. We’ll probably try to offer you fairy stock in our unicorn company in exchange for dollar bills to build our “innovative” and “original” website.

Jane, it seems since our schedules rarely align, we never get to have our morning commutes together. I do enjoy hearing about how you juggle family life with the demands of our insane agency. As Jimbo says, “There are [three kinds of people in the world]: realists, optimists, and Genuine Interactive management.” I hope all is well in your corner of the .NET islands, where Jimbo roams free like a wild beast in untamed hinterlands. I suppose the old adage, “it takes a village to raise a child” is particularly apt here, don’t you think? Well, I guess if the child is a rampaging programmer and by “raising” the villagers mean, “using pitchforks to defend themselves.” To long life, prosperity, and productivity.

Sometimes I imagine what it will be like in the year 3800, when everyone will have uploaded their minds to Googleface Plus, and people will communicate teletweetically. Undoubtedly very little will have changed, and aside from the Earth having been paved to accommodate the parking lot of The One Walmart (the foundations of which entombs our collective iLife), people will still be disgusting 4chan trolls, corporeal or not. I imagine life will be easier then, because we will have crowdsourced our free will to New Jersey, the last remaining third world country on Earth. Mister Andy MF*#^$!ing Solo, if I were writing this letter on one of those infernal machines connected to the series of tubes, and not this sexy chrome workhorse named Christine, I would insert a link to YouTube right about now. Instead, enjoy this anachronistic emoticon of a wumpus:

&@.,.,.,.,.,@&

(Source: truthinfuckminor)

I have thus far painted a rather bleak portrait of our pursuit, waving a niggling finger at every turn as if to say, No No No Mister Andrew Rohman, here is an impolite world full of deceitful things, and you shall have it for breakfast every morning. But I promise you I have in my fist clasped that one sincere thing in the whole world, or perhaps two. 

In the meantime you argue: Certainly there exist a host of things, which are by their very definition sincere, like Anselm said of God and perfection?

Beauty, for example. To the ancient Greeks, to be beautiful means to be timely, and not in a sense that underscores the fact that we are becoming more decrepit by the minute. Instead, the Greeks understood Beauty as the state of the thing when it behaves as it should for its time. In other words, a filthy pig wallowing in its filth is beautiful because that is what pigs do, they are filthy, and to be filthy for a pig is to be virtuous. 

But that is rather circular, don’t you think? After all, if you were an Olympian goddess and your heavenly consort claimed that his banging every nymph from Tartarus to Elysium was excusable because “hedonism is in his heavenly nature,” wouldn’t you too send deadly vipers to extinguish every one of his bastard children? I know I would. 

More to the point: Need I say anything of Beauty in our contemporary West? I don’t take you for a fool, peaceable good honorable kind Reverend Andrew Rohman, so I won’t. 

Seneca the Younger said it best: Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.

creeper

In many of these letters I have been discussing people’s names, their peculiarities and their excellence. Yours is one that fits the bill: Jake [REDACTED]. Now there is a name of a shadowy underdog, whose dark mission is to infiltrate some seedy underworld and expose its hideousness for the good of humanity. Naturally, you will need a supervillain whose name is comparably strange. There are plenty of Russians in the office to choose from, but they are too obvious. Russians are always evil. I mean, look at Jimbo. Instead, I suggest Colby [REDACTED]. Here is someone unassuming, soft-spoken, exceptionally polite… but possibly and secretly irredeemably evil, so incontrovertibly ruthless that we would never expect that he has been masterminding us the entire time. It would be like the movie Unbreakable, except not awful and with way more tweeting. 

The Inquiry:

My company is looking to make some updates to our intranet page. It was created in Dreamweaver a number of years ago, and I’ve been making basic updates to it over the past year or so (mainly copying and pasting existing code to add to our document database). We’d like to spruce things up well beyond what I know how to do in Dreamweaver.

Translation:

My company builds jetpacks for orphans and operates twelve mining colonies on Mars, but because they’re so goddamned cheap, they still force me to use a typewriter to send out memos. Please save me from this data entry hell before I throw myself out an airlock. 

Mister Sam, there are many ways to dispose of a body, but few, as we discussed previously, are as effective as sealing it up in an old couch or mattress and selling it on the Internet. Like any poorly managed social media network, aging Christmas ham, or Craigslist, a corpse is something nobody wants, but a cheap couch is nearly irresistible in this down economy. And given the anonymity modern society affords salesmen of all stripes and colors, there is no time like the present to get away with murder. Merry Christmas.