Dear Mr. Humanity
I recently acquired a jar of your new product, the Clam-O-Naise bivalve-focused mayonnaise, and wanted to express to you my admiration and sincere thanks. For years now, I’ve firmly believed that you could not produce something worse than your eponymous card game, and when I learned of the existence of this new mayonnaise, I was afraid that this worldview of mine would be shaken to its very foundations.
Mr. Humanity, it is so very nice to be proven right. Thank you.
I often think back to the long and dusty trip I took with my family and seventy-five of my closest strangers, in a mule-driven prairie schooner from Independence City, Missouri to my current home in Portland, Oregon. Though we’d all read The Prairie Traveler, and outfitted our wagons with care, somehow the long and boring nights on the sea of grass, with only the unflinching stars and howls of coyotes to keep us company, were never mentioned, and we brought little to entertain ourselves with. So imagine how pleased we all were when on the third night of our long journey, ol’ Jebediah mentioned that he’d brought a game with him to keep us all entertained!
Somehow, your game became the defining feature of those nights, and then, after we reached our new home here in the rain-and-wind swept hipster penal colony of Oregon, we kept playing it. And, unlike your molluscular mayonnaise, oh, how I grew to hate your game.
It’s kind of remarkable how similar this shellfish-infused mayonnaise is to your game, sir. If I were looking for adjectives to describe both this delectable spread, and your game, I might pick any terms from the following list: greasy, loose, slimy, spicy, salty, and overhyped. I actually think the mayonnaise is pretty tasty - all of the above are fine terms to apply to an emulsion-based sandwich topping, if not to a “fun” game. If I have one complaint about it, it’s that it’s too loose and slippery to stay on a sandwich well; this is more of an aioli than it is a sandwich mayo. Say what you will about Mr. Hellman - I don’t know him like you do, as I do not move in the rarefied circles of sandwich spread inventors - but his mayonnaise has staying power, both in the market, and it’s stiff enough to sit on a slice of bread and stand up to the barest amount of pressure without falling oozing off onto the plate/pants/cat, whatever happens to be below your food at the time of consumption.
Well, but I guess I have two complaints. The second is the quality of the cards inside the jar of clam-yo. Not to break the fourth wall or anything, but as I was thinking about the letter I’d be writing you, I said to myself – wouldn’t it be a funny conceit to pick a random card from the pack, and work that phrase into each paragraph in this silly letter I’m writing? Well, sir, I even reached deep into the jar of Clam-O-Naise to recover the card pack – as if I were James Cameron exploring the Titanic, I even made sure to hum inspiring music (the melodeon cover of the Jurassic Park theme) while doing it – and then washed them from their greasy coffin and opened up the surprisingly thick plastic you encased them in… only to find that this particular set of cards didn’t even rise to the level of “potentially mildly amusing” that your other holiday card packs have attained. Lo, I hung my head in embarrassment… not for myself, but for you.
The only card I might – might – have been able to use in this endeavor read “Not even knowing what's happening anymore” but even using that put me between the horns of a dilemma. Sure, I could have thought, as a facile simpleton, hurr durr this is a ironic statement about the fact that a playing card company has produced infaunal-infused sandwich emulsions, how droll… but that would play into the inescapable fact that you, sir, know EXACTLY what you’re doing. Your joke, this joke, has been made so many times it’s beginning to be played out… which is exactly what happens with your game, by the way. The ironic detachment of “not even knowing” is being used here as a transparent defense mechanism, to defend yourself against your own sure and certain knowledge that the days of this joke are numbered.
Anyway, the point here is: good job on the mayonnaise. It’s tasty and an acceptable addition to any sandwich. But if I’m being honest, there’s something bigger that I really like about this newest business foray of yours, sir: even though your website spends a lot of time building “clever” neologisms (as does your brand name), it does not modify the discourse. And yes, even here in our miserable, mossy, rotting cedar shake-covered potato sheds in this brave outpost of the American Frontier of Oregon, we are aware of the discourse.
Mostly, the discourse is only ever lowered, and there are plenty of things that have done it. Memes. QAnon. The Princeton professor and moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s seminal work “On Bullshit.” And while your card game doesn’t exactly have the same cultural impact of QAnon, doesn’t quite yet have the ubiquity of memes, and isn’t as precisely definitional as Franklin, it bears a striking resemblance to another phenomenon that has done a perfectly serviceable job of trashing the public discourse: South Park.
Yes, the boys of South Park, Colorado, that county that I had the displeasure of passing through on my journey across the desolate Rocky Mountains on my way to the pine-scented wasteland of the Willamette Valley. When it first came out, back in the 90s, I was amused by it for maybe four episodes, before realizing (along with many of my generation) that it was a nihilistic pit of despair produced by narcissistic savages. Most well-meaning folks I attend parties with tend to be intelligent, progressive types, and have mostly rejected the immature nihilism of that most irritating of teevee shows… and yet they are reduced to giggling high school freshmen, who somehow think that playing the card “the biggest blackest dick” in response to some card like, oh, I don’t know, “What did Mama Kass actually choke on” is suddenly the height of comedy.
Sir, I tolerated your game on the long, dusty road to Oregon, when ol’ Jebediah pulled out that giant box of nonsense. I suppose I whiled away many hours that would otherwise have been spent honing my trail knife yet another time, or waxing and caulking my covered wagon for the nine millionth time. I can’t say it ever brought me hours of joy; I can only say it wasted hours that would otherwise have been wasted in a slightly different way.
But now, as I sit among the moss and lichen and drips of rainwater leaking through the gaps in my pine-bough covered lean-to, and I think about the parties I’ve recently been to at which someone pulls out your game, I’m reminded of how often I will play card combinations that simply are not funny, and in fact are actively offensive, to try to get the people I am playing with to end the gameplay and do oh god anything else, because your game is the absolute pits.
Finally, while this letter has gone on long enough, I can imagine you, sir, sitting there and reading this letter and dismissing it with an off the cuff comment like “I bet you’re fun at parties” and moving on. Well, I AM fun at parties; part of that is not needing your dumb game to have a good time. But that won’t be enough for you, so please enjoy this bespoke drawing I have made specially for you, of what I am sure would be a “winning” hand and gaining me an oh so critical point in some erstwhile round of your game. Or, to steal a phrase from the great Kurt Vonnegut (who yes, even here in the Oregon hinterlands we have heard of): “Here is my drawing of an asshole.”
Sincerely,
Alex Parise
