Ells Bevels

In which our Hero explains just what the flipping ell is going on and puts a little shape around the whole consternating mess

The consternation, mock and real, as I post the “Ell” entries is a very odd thing. And I wonder if I shouldn’t have a preamble, or perhaps an apres-amble; something to aid the digestion, felicitate the health, and make clear the rules of the game. Except I’m making up the rules as I go, and ignoring them at need.

The initial thought comes from an OD meme that occasionally goes around where you write something heartfelt but anonymous to one or another of your favourites. It can be good, it can be bad, but it doesn’t have a name attached. There’s something fascinating in the peek into the personal. Like it’s almost a distilled essence of what OD is because it’s back to being almost completely anonymous.

You know what I mean? It’s those passages that go like, You are someone who inspires me, who makes me wake up and look around and boldly dream, vividly dream, of a day when I will stand across from you and kick you in the dangly bits with such force that they will rocket through your entire torso and pop out of your ears, so that they’ll be referring to you as “testicle-ears” in the emergency room (because it’s not like you’ll be able to hear them say it)

Something like that. Anyway, I like them. And I’ve been thinking about doing another one of those entries, with various notes for various people but then I thought about the way Nocturne responds when I write her a letter, however silly it has been. And I thought that it might be interesting to tweak the meme and write an anonymous letter to an individual favourite, as a chance to tell some of them how much they mean to me and how they affect my life.

Obviously I can’t just write a letter a day. That’d be an interesting challenge for me, but dreadfully boring for the reader. And anyway, what if something more interesting happened that day. Like… uh.. solving world hunger, or… shining my shoes…

So the project was still forming in my head. And I hadn’t gotten around to writing an explanation when I reached a point of frustration with one favourite that led me to throw up my hands in disgust (which is a curious phrase because you’d think i’d already have been disgusted at eating my hands in the first place). And then a long-lost favourite surfaced out of nowhere, and the three-ness of that situation was far more important than my OCD tendencies. And scanning the list of favourites shows me a few where there’s some overdue housekeeping.

But this is the project:

• Write an anonymous letter to a favourite (them anonymous, I mean I kinda gave away that the letter is from me, neh?)
• When I feel like it
• One person per letter
• Be honest but never mean