Burn After Not Reading

Issue 201

Buffalo, New York 2022

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If I happen to get hit by a crosstown bus, I would like to ask a favor. There’s nothing specific about the bus—any decent city provides ample opportunities to end the day earlier than expected. The result is simply less of me and more of you. Here’s the favor: open up my computer, look in my documents, and delete the last two or three items. The second part of the favor is exactly the same but in analogue form. After you finish laughing at the ludicrous amount of notebooks scattered around here—and, please, do enjoy the moment—could you tear out the last few pages in each one? If you desire a dramatic scene, you can burn those pages, although there’s nothing wrong with tossing them into the recycle bin.

This isn’t a conspiracy. I’m not requesting that you hide information or keep secrets or cover up crimes. There’s nothing even that shameful, I assume, on those pages. My thoughts, ideas, theories, preferences, and memories are open for voyeurs: I am neither concealing what’s personal nor even expecting anybody to be that interested. In performing this generous favor, however, you are saving me from the horror of exhibiting the unfinished, the poorly-articulated, and the disjointed. You’ll find, I believe, a fair amount of scribbled lines, though you’ll be unlikely to link them in a coherent fashion, because my notes and early drafts resemble childlike brushstrokes rather than completed pictures.