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here you go Michael S. DeBonis 07.19.02-St. Louis, MO |
“Tomarken.com was made for you.”
These are the words of one Daniel Beckman, co-founder, and tireless cheerleader for Tomarken.com. This is a man of limitless determination, who has, since the inception of this website, plagued me with his psychological game of cat and mouse. A constant flow of harassing reminders through threatening phone calls and emails are the legacy of this sadistic plot.
“Hey, dude, when are you going to submit something?” and “Are you ever going to send me an article or should I just stop asking?” and even, “I’m not going to hang out with you if I don’t get something THIS WEEK.”
I admit that when I was first approached with the idea of Tomarken I was excited and optimistic. It sounded like a new, interesting and, yes, even perhaps noble addition to the opaque fog that is now the World Wide Web. I began working on a few ideas, but found that I had no coherent theses and I wasn’t quite comfortable publishing work that was sub-par. This was explained several times to the aforementioned party but the harassment continued.
Now, a good deal of time has passed and Tomarken has evolved and grown into a comfortable niche of content and function. I now see that coherent thoughts are not a necessary element to the theme or general goals of Tomarken as a whole. What I once found a chaotic storm of incoherent bullshit, I now see as a unique form of communal expression, and a truly remarkable triumph for free speech and liberation (in general).
So because I want Beckman to come to my house and get all the shit he left here, and because I can stand the emotional abuse no longer, this work is hereby created with the hopes that it will neither offend nor enlighten anyone at all.
I hereby state my intent to respond to Mr. DeBonis:
And then I say to you, sir, that you have accomplished that which you have set out not to do, the very thing that you said you didn’t want to accomplish, the end result that you strove to evade: you have enlightened me. Not in a life changing manner, or, indeed, any noticeable way, but, as I sit here, I sit, changed. I believe it was a dose of honesty touched with a tinge of candor that is so sorely lacking in the literary world today. So I say to you, Mr. DeBonis, you may have failed in your mission, but you have succeeded where many have not. God bless, and Godspeed.