Dear Sir or Madame,

Thank you for your quick response.  However, I am very dismayed with the decision to block my application for graduation.  If you will allow me, I would like to make my case for acceptance into the spring graduating class of 2009.

I am aware that on my official transcript I have a received an ‘F’ in English 315 – 17^th Century Poetry.  I would like to renew my petition, previously submitted to the Dean of Arts, in relation to this grade.  Simply put, my Teacher’s Assistant bore a striking resemblance to my mother, a wonderful woman who, of course, barred me from ever reading anything written by a dead person for fear of conjuring their demon spirit.  My act of juvenile rebellion, as well as the intricate tattooing along my calves that burn when I am disobedient, caused me a great deal of stress.  My mother and I are understandably very close, raising me as she did by herself in an eight foot by eight foot shack she built with her own grit in the forgotten swamps of western Ontario.  (To my surprise, many people here in Montreal have asked me how our living arrangement is possible.  A learned person yourself, I’m sure you can understand when I say that simple living requires only a small wood burning stove and a five foot by three foot bed to share while we huddle waiting for our only set of clothes to dry after a hard day’s work gathering herbs and toads in the swamp).  Given the high post you have achieved in your life, I feel I can safely assume that you as well have an irreversible bond with your mother.  As such, I’m sure you can understand why the likeness of my own sent me running out of the exam hall, screaming and tearing at my clothes as though I were being wrung by the grim spectral hands of John Donne.  Although I understand the importance this institution places on its final exams, I feel that the immediacy with which I fixed leeches on my eyelids to cry the cleansing, bloody tears of shame and submission should count for something.  Perhaps a ‘C’.

As well I would like to protest the D- I received in Cultural Studies 206 on the basis that I am very uncomfortable talking about black people.

Thank you in advance,

Kyle Stevenson

P.S. Please burn this letter so that, if upon my death I am devoured by the dark worm god Moira, I will not be accidentally summoned to bring ill fortune on your heirs.

The Beginning

God made existence cool, a trend that has stayed popular to present day, save for a brief period in 2001 with the formation of My Chemical Romance.  Today the only bastion of resistance can be found in certain parts of the southern United States, where they are waiting for him to take it all back any day now.

9503 BC – Og

During the Neolithic, Og’s invention of sarcasm in spoken language catapulted him into the upper echelons of high society. Not meaning what you said took off, quickly supplanting actually saying what you mean.  Society began to fall into ruin as trade relations broke down across the Levant. Meanwhile, Og began a series of high-profile relationships with several prominent shiny rock models. The fame gone to his head, Og was eventually trampled to death by a herd of buffalo after he responded to their warning grunts with what is roughly translated as “Yeah, right.” At his funeral cairn, the crowd claimed to be very sad, but didn’t sound convincing.

3 AD – Abaddon Butabi

The palsy that left an up-and-coming Greek harp player with only spastic control of his limbs would eventually be the impetus to his great fame.  Butabi’s determination, jerky plucking, and the harsh, piercing cries that spewed from his drooping face as he sat locked in his grandfather’s basement condemned as a monster would give birth to techno music.  His fame was posthumous, however, as techno was never fully appreciated until 1528, with the invention of ecstasy.

1876 AD – Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell, (or, A.G. Baby as his friends were wont to call him) was a notorious socialite from the age of fifteen, the year he invented cocaine.  The life of every party, A.G. Baby only invented the telephone so he wouldn’t miss out on parties two towns over and so he could peddle his cocaine on a national scale (or, as he called it, “whistling dixie”).  His untimely and mysterious death in the sewers of Brooklyn from a prolific nosebleed spawned the popular term rusty pipe.

1994 AD – Tupac Amaru Shakur

Tupac (also 2Pac) invented the thug life, as well as getting tattoos on one’s stomach.  And although many incorrectly would give the mantle to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, it was in fact Tupac who invented getting shot.

~ Kyle Stevenson

I’ve never believed in anything like I believed in them. 

Back then, I would bring my Power Rangers lunchbox to my kindergarten class in the morning, and I would spend each subsequent afternoon being looked after by Gatina, a warm, plump, motherly Greek woman who, despite being so endowed, was not my mother. She ran a daycare out of her house and was patient enough to engage me in various debates, such as the likelihood of me ever liking girls and pro v. con: can a waterbed save you from a house fire?  She was a wise woman.

One day we walked through the aisles of the local grocery store.  I dutifully put her chosen items into the cart, withholding the eggplant so as to gain the confidence boost that comes with having a makeshift club at one’s disposal.  I must have been especially good or especially whiny, because before we left she led me to the Shoddily Made Toys aisle, common to most medium to large sized grocery stores, and told me I could pick something.

            “How about a cow?”, she asked me.  “Or a horse?”

My gaze held no regard for plastic animals.  My eyes were immediately and irrevocably fixed upon a light blue gun.  This light blue gun, as I recall, had a spring loaded feed that kept up to a dozen thin plastic disks mashed up into it if you really packed them in tight, pushing the spring down much farther than it was supposed to go.  This was very necessary, because an extra four shots could mean the difference between a glorious imaginary victory and a brutal imaginary death.  The disks were fed into the barrel from below.  When you pressed the trigger a plastic bit slid across the stack of disks, pushing the top one out the barrel at a tremendous speed. 

            “You have to promise you won’t shoot anyone”, Gatina said.

I promised, but already in my head I was shooting everyone.  I was laying waste to that grocery store.  The staff in the aisles were crashing through their carefully arranged displays as I blew them away.  I was diving into the deli, taking everyone out at the knees.  I was shooting those plastic farm animals because they were terrible, terrible toys.  I was not shooting Gatina.  She had bought me the gun.

Guns played a major role in my development, well into grade school.  Where as most of my friends had one or two, I had dozens.  If it launched a foam dart across the room, potentially and surprisingly often right into an unsuspecting friend’s eye, then I wanted it.  I wanted it bad.  One Christmas my grandpa got me a rifle that shot plastic suction cup bullets.  Run of the mill, you might think, but when he shot me with it in good humour I began to cry, apparently because it was surprisingly powerful or because I was a pussy. It was deemed too dangerous and my grandpa said he’d take it to hunt seals in the Arctic, a promise I believe he has yet to make good on. A year later I was kept awake again by the sudden, heart-rending understanding that my moment of weakness had cost me perhaps the greatest gun I had ever laid my hands upon.  It was a night spent in dark rumination on what might have been.

After that mechanical dysfunction, I made two forays into the realm of outdated, but no less awesome, violence.  Did you know that before the invention of the longbow, knights were virtually invincible in battle?  I did, because that’s the sort of thing that turns my crank. The weapons are the common foot soldier were largely useless against a knight’s layers of plate and chain mail armor. My first bow landed me in trouble after I shot at a passing car and then hid under the bushes after they stopped, apparently quite upset about my assault on their hubcap.  It was a terrible hiding spot and I was very quickly caught.  I don’t think my parents ever hired that babysitter again.  My second bow was ingeniously made at lunchtime with a chopstick, a ruler and an elastic band.  It landed me in front of the vice principal, a very nice woman who was passionate about art and had taught me in the fourth grade.  She’d had our class make kiln fired clay fish for Mother’s Day.  I had made a manta ray.  She was very upset with me, despite having quite liked my manta ray.

 “Is this a Japanese chopstick or a Chinese chopstick?” she inquired gruffly.  “Because if it’s Japanese then it came sharpened like this, but if it’s Chinese then you sharpened it.” 

Her mastery of Asian culture only confused me, so she rounded on her main point. 

“Having a weapon like this at school could get you expelled!”

I, in a continuation of a theme almost as prominent in my life as weaponry, broke down and cried like a Nancy.  In elementary school I was the type of boy who was often struck in the balls by all manner of things, so crying in such an unabashed fashion in public was not foreign to me.  To this day the regularity with which I was sacked confounds me, as I did not have particularly large balls.  In all honesty, I suspect they were (are?) slightly smaller than the statistical average.

From here I could segue into my junior high love affair with professional wrestling, but it would be superfluous.  The short of it is that I spent two years asking people if I could “just try this move out” on them, which required a lot of pelvis contact and was not well received.

It’s a good thing I don’t seek validation through women.

                                                                                                                                         ~ Kyle Stevenson

Taken From Hesiod’s Works and Days

            It was a slow Thursday’s eve that mighty Zeus, son of Kronos and ruler of all gods and men, did find himself unhappily in front of his divine computer diddling his privates for the third time that day.  Unhappily he did diddle, as he had at long last exhausted the ancient world’s supply of porn, and Zeus did hate to see the same ass fucked twice.  A divine frigid bitch was Zeus’s wife, and so parting the clouds Zeus did descend to Earth to pick up.

            Zeus in his mortal form was magnificent.  Though collars had not been invented yet, Zeus did pop his on high.  His slacks of silk blends, unknown to men, needed no stuffing, as they tapered up to display the son of Kronos’s near omnipresent package.

            Zeus found a suitable mate in a comely young Theban named Semele.  Retiring to her bedchamber, (for his was too far away, he told her), he confided in her that he was the one mighty Zeus.  Semele did accept this at once, for she was easily convinced and not unused to role play. 

            And so the two did enter into a secret liason, Semele the most honored booty call and receptacle for the glory of Zeus.  It was not long though before Hera, the frigid and ungratifying wife of Zeus, discovered the affair.  Visiting Semele, disguised as her old nurse, Hera inquired into her conjugal affairs. 

“Oh my gawd”, Semele did exclaim, ejaculating with pride, “I’m totally doing Zeus.”  And she did go on to explain his great collar popped on high, the omnipresence of his package and the ocean upon which he rocked her. 

            Hera in her guise did nod sagely as though she gave a shat and then offered Semele her dire counsel.

            “Zeus may well be a daemon in the sack, but as long as he comes to you as a mortal, you shall never lay with him as immortal Hera does.”

            And so it came to pass that the next time that Zeus came down – bedecked now in sweat pants and a baggy robe from the local gymnasium as he was well past seeking to impress young worn-in Semele – that she met him with her arms folded, her legs crossed and her chin imperiously in the air.  Zeus did comment on her posture, and upon laying naked on the bed asked her to speed up her own disrobing as he had a rather important meeting in forty-five and they’d have to be quick.  Semele in her feminine guile demanded that Zeus swear on the river Styx to grant her one demand whatever it may be, lest she stay clothed today and forever when he came to visit.  Zeus did again feel the deep burn in his unreasonable masculinity, and so he relented.  Seizing on her opportunity Semele did demand that Zeus shed his divine form and come to her as he came to immortal Hera.  Zeus did try to dissuade her, suggesting all manner of shakers and plugs that could perhaps satiate the change she craved, but no, Semele would not be turned on.  And so, with some regret, Zeus did shed his mortal form and come to Semele as the greatest of the gods and she did squirm, writhe, bite her lip, moan and was ultimately incinerated by Zeus’s mighty, mighty, mighty, mighty penis.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                ~Kyle Stevenson