It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The difficult second essay.
Okay. I’ve put my characters out into the world, but I really don’t know what they’re going to do there. So I do a little character work with the Rolling Stones motif, then I free-associate some intrigue until giving up and restating the mission as I understood it then. That’s a choice. It’s the choice to keep typing.
Chapter 4, which tries to do it all.
Credit where credit is due: my friend Andre first suggested the French resistance fighters in the sewers.
Tooting my own horn: I still love the monkey’s dialogue. It speaks volumes to me.
And now we have it. Landfall on a new idea.
I don’t remember why I thought it would be fun to have the crew arrive somewhere. I have no clue who threw the boomerang. But this is where I commit to the setting - a decade before I would read Moby-Dick or visit Tahiti.
I thought it was funny to keep changing the name of the supercomputer, but I suspect that’s the sort of thing that gets lost in the noise.
Anyway. To my mind, it’s simple. The Misters went looking for a powerful relic, they got distracted, they went off course, now they’re in a mythical place that merits exploration. What was once random is now a narrative. Let’s dig in.
I believe this is the last mention of the monkey’s love life.
A classic timeless beginning that quickly slides into the most dated thing it could possibly be. Tra la!
This one is a bit of stopgap. Looks like I wrote it after attending Coachella as a “journalist”. Ha! Ha!
I like the details of how the Misters adapt and I love the bit with Mister Malice, but it all leads into a parody of newspaper columns (that barely existed in 2003) and is certainly even more obscure than my usual reach.
Here we are, where the pieces fall into place. The monkey is now a full Mister. Potrzebie is a way to express my ideas of heaven. We’re in full self-indulgence mode, and the living is Potrzezie.
Utopia is where you write it.
We’ve been on this train for a little more than a week, would anyone like a recap?
I didn't intend to put Mister Wonderful on an island with a new monkey friend, but it certainly felt right as it happened.
There are like six ideas here searching for connective tissue, but the main takeaway is that once the monkey becomes a Mister, Wonderful is triple-teamed.
So in this middle period, we’re just adding more color to Mister Wonderful’s island heaven, and then answering new mail. The narrative stalls while the world-building continues because I’m all Tolkien and whatnot.
POSTCARDS FROM THE LETCH
In which we learn webcams were lousy back then, but we have the ability to make up new captions now, so that’s cool.
This one is total filler. Which means its an excuse to play with language and be extra clever, without actually being about anything. It’s okay with me.
This is an unusual hybrid installment. It’s got the narrative Potrzebie bits, but the query they segue into is in a format I really only used with one correspondent, my good friend Neil using the nom de ? of Just Wondering. The back and forth of it is undoubtedly due to Brooks and Reiner records.
It’s the density of the oblique references that’s so pleasing. And anti-commercial.
Ah, what an idiot am I. It’s not actually clever, it’s just what I know, and expect everyone else to know also.
One of my favorites, I think. At least the second half, which y’know, hey.
I don’t recall if it took this long to fix my computer in real life, but I seem quite keen on reminding folks why we’re in this odd narrative format still.
Three. I say there are at least three good jokes in this one, despite my apparent obsession with how unwell Bob Hope seemed at the time.
An amusing attempt at an origin story for some of our players, only slightly marred by the fact I would re-use the best gag a year later and it’s already been reprinted in this archive. Sigh.
The trick to finding out what you didn’t know you already knew is to build a character that always has to have an answer for everything, then disguise yourself as another character to ask the hard ones. It’s like a Perpetual Notion Machine.
Another picture post! Why? I do not recall! But please enjoy this tour of my desk in 2003, and the many toys thereon.
Oh, I can tread water with the best of them. Indeed, I only tread the best water.
Seriously, I love the opening on this. I love the aching tension between the real, the real, and the real. It’s an Escher Sketch.
Two things about this one:
1) It’s clear that I’m receiving new emails somehow, but I won’t let go of the island conceit until I’ve got access to my old inbox. Shame I never made a joke about needing a Treasure IMAP.
2) There’s an allusion to Doctor Who in the sign off and I didn't even know I had such stuff in my mind in 2003.
Old me has started to pad out the intro, I can see. It’s my desire to write an entire magazine but my hook is still this Question Column. Everything yearns to find its shape.
If I could’ve answered the Query portion these days, I would have made much of DSM V VS ASMR.
Nothing really happens - there’s a bit of world-building (I couldn’t tell you now if it was a metaphor for anything), there’s some more tap dancing about the broken computer, and something that tries to be funny about VR gaming.
Then Mister Dark wanders in to make the whole business worthwhile.
I want to repeat that I had not actually read Moby-Dick by this point. I don’t know how that apt reference drifted back in time.
There’s actually something to the answer to query in this one. Something I needed to tell myself in the future (now).
Well, let’s call this one Problematic.
The set-up is fine. It’s out of nowhere, but it’s better than another “everything is fine here” intro.
The question and answer is… woo. I’m sure it all meant something different at the time to people in the know.
In case the picture is not clear, our merry band is leading off the island like a baseball metaphor.
The idea was to always have Mister Monkey answer with Shakespeare quotes. I don’t know if I stuck to that.
So I gave up the island conceit and jumped into writing another book. (The characters got as far as my version of Hell, where we would’ve confronted a friend, but I hate confrontation so.)
When the column resumed regular business, the location snapped back to Wonderful Labs without explanation. Still I miss that little island experiment, as Dr. Moreau said.
And here, I’m afraid, is where we start to get wordy.
The background is just that my computer died, and I had no access to my email. “F*%$ it,” I thought. “Let’s write anyway.”
So join us now, 16 years ago, when Mister Wonderful lost his computer and started a month-long journey that would lead to a mystical island paradise, an aviation mystery solved, and a new Mister in the house. So begins the Potrzebie Saga.