For some time now, I have promised to regale the tiny dog readership with the idiotic fanfic I wrote on a manual typewriter when I was in junior high. But when I actually look through the still-existing pages of this horrifying dreck, I immediately chicken out, unable to face the reality of my own pathetic, graspingly unoriginal 13 year old self.

Case in point: in one scene, my Mary Sue character "Camille Hilsinger" impresses the Monkees with two "original" Casio keyboard compositions (actually, songs by A-Ha and Phil Collins, that I found particularly moving in those days). Let us note that, although presumably indoors, the sunset apparently lights up my auburn hair during the performance. When I am done, all the Monkees get drunk on brandy and fall in love with me, one by one. Yes, the Monkees. No, I am not going to excerpt it here. Oh, OK:

"I love you, Mickey, you must have known it, but you were never mine, you belong to the band, to the tour bus, and when it's gone... so are you."

Even more hideously, the pages of fanfic are interdispersed with typewritten diary entries detailing my infatuation with a wholly unworthy, acne-tinged dweeb from my remedial math-for-angry-delinquents class.

Each day while our math teacher drank bourbon out of his thermos, this knobby kneed twerp strung me along with totally insincere flirtation, while actually dating another bony, pimpled preadolescent named Mindy. In the sorry, double-sided pages, I painfully detail my daily attempts to hold his fair weather attentions by pretending to be confident, quite an Oscar winning performance for a 13 year old female:

"It was definite: he hated me. So today, I wanted to die. Halfway thru math I just said to myself, "What the hell, why not be cheerful," and I smiled and acted confident. He must have started to look at me or something then, because when we went out the door... surprise, he actually started to talk to me. Now I've learned an important lesson: always act happy, no matter what."

Oh lord, I am not sure where to begin with all the ways that is wrong. Let us take this time out of our busy web surfing lives to curse him, wherever he now lives.

This collection of type-writings is rounded out by several poems that are so maudlin and shameful that reading them would make you go blind ("inner thoughts hurl like waves upon a ragged shore"), and several drafts of a letter I never sent my cousins in Arkansas concerning my trip to Six Flags to see the Monkee's 20th reunion tour (in which Herman's Hermits and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap were also headliners). Needless to say, this rocked my world ("ACTUALLY see Davey LIVE IN PERSON? I could just die. Correction: I have died"), and I wanted Arkansas to know about it.

Oh, the humanity.

I'm sure you were cool when you were 13 though, and it was just me. I'm positive in fact. Just look at you. You were so smart, you burned all the evidence, so no one will ever really know.

Fan mail

So, tiny dog sends fan mail and inquiry about art for sale to favorite cartoonist and general world-view oracle, Lynda Barry... AND GETS A REPLY! On excellent Japanese stationary with little ghost-cats! And gets drawing of Marlys with my name on it! You know how your mail can suck for years, and then suddenly, one day, it's awesome.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.