deadletterpost

[deadletterpost]

Dylan

Hey bud, I need your help with something.

So you know how Beth is like OBSESSED with that one particular star of that one particular boy band? I don't want to say who in case I incriminate myself, but you know who I'm talking about. I'm not jealous or anything. It's not like she and him are gonna get together. Sure it's a little weird sometimes that I have to share the bed with his body pillow, but her passion is part of what I love about her. Anyway, her birthday is coming up, and I wanted to get or something special, and I remembered you can buy locks of this guy's hair online, and I know she would LOVE that! But it turns out it's like, crazy expensive. Like I looked on ebay and these things were going for tens of thousands of dollars. And as much as I love Beth, I just don't have that kind of money to shell out. So I hatched a cunning plan. It turns out, this guy only lives like an hour away from us. He's pretty secretive about it, but the fan message boards are. . .well, they're pretty dedicated. So last night, I took my scissors and a plastic bag and I just drove out there. His house was like, really easy to break into. Like you'd think there would be a security guard or something for someone so famous but he didn't even lock his upstairs windows. He had a security system, but I guess he forgot to set it, the place was pretty trashed I think he'd just had a party or something. That made me feel better too, because I thought if he was drunk he might not wake up so easily. So I found him asleep in his bedroom, like completely passed out, and very quietly I snuck up to his bed and used my scissors to cut off a little chunk of his hair. He didn't even twitch. Then I got to thinking, with how much these sell for, there must be a million dollars on this guy's head! More than that! So I started cutting off a few more. I was trying to cut them in places he wouldn't notice. One here, one there, you know? But I guess I got carried away because then my bag was full and this guy looked like a toothbrush when you've used it for too long and the bristles are all bent up and falling out. Anyway I figured it was time to get out of there, so I climbed back out the window and drove home. I gave Beth some of the hair (couldn't wait for her birthday) and she loved it! Said it's the best gift she's ever gotten! But now I'm sitting on what I'm guessing is about 200 locks of stolen hair, and I have no idea how to move this stuff. I know you used to sell stereos on craigslist, so I'm hoping you can help me get rid of this hair, and get us both rich in the process!

Let me know what you think

Liam

PS: I took a photo of him asleep, in case we would need that to prove it's his hair. Maybe that could be useful.

Ed. note: attached is a printed photo of a man who, to the best of our knowledge, has never been famous.

[deadletterpost]

Dr. Jacob Foster, 2/13/1987

Dear Dr. Foster,

I hope this letter finds you well. I saw you speak at a conference last year, and I must admit I was skeptical about your field of study, but a case has recently come to me that has changed my mind entirely. Attached are copies of my notes, please give them a read-over—I think you'll find them interesting, and I'm in desperate need of your expertise on this matter.

—

2/6/87

Subject came into my office saying he had a very unusual problem, a problem that has plagued him for several years. Specialists up and down the coast have been unable to help him, and now he's given up on solutions. He just wants to know what's happening to him.

"Every time I open a cabinet," he told me, "all of its contents fall out."

I assumed at first that his problem was mental, some bizarre delusion. I was trying to decide on my next line of questioning when he stood up, walked to the supply cabinet, and flung it open. Pencils, paper, paperclips, boxes of staples, and packs of post-it notes tumbled out of the cabinet as he stepped deftly out of the way.

For a moment I was struck dumb. My next thought was that this man had somehow snuck into my office while I was out and carefully arranged the contents of my cabinet, as some bizarre prank. I asked if he would submit to further verification, and he agreed, so I took him out of the room and found another cabinet in an unused classroom down the hall. In the same practiced motion he'd used before, he flung open the cabinet and took a large step backward as all the contents of the cabinet poured out onto the floor.

I told him to come back on Monday.

2/9/87

Experiment 1

Sent some graduate students to acquire a variety of cabinets and cabinet-like objects. We now have:

1 freestanding floor cabinet

1 kitchen cabinet, meant to be mounted on a wall

1 miniature refrigerator

1 wardrobe

1 filing cabinet

1 glass-fronted curio cabinet

Our goal is to identify how a cabinet is defined, according to this phenomenon. Hypothesis: any enclosed space of a certain size is a cabinet.

We used a collection of children's building blocks as our cabinet fodder, the rationale being that they would be easy to stack and not overly dangerous if they fell onto someone. Subject opened each cabinet 10 times. In every case the falling of blocks, from here on called "expulsion", occurred either 100% of the time or 0% of the time.

The floor cabinet and the kitchen cabinet both elicited expulsion. The refrigerator and the wardrobe did not, disproving the hypothesis: while the wardrobe was significantly larger than any other container, the volume of the fridge was between that of the floor and kitchen cabinets. The filing cabinet also elicited no expulsion. I was most anticipating the curio cabinet, as I hoped the glass front would allow us to witness whatever mechanism was causing the expulsion. I feared it would simply not work, but the actual outcome was stranger.

The cabinet wouldn't open. The subject pulled, but it seemed to be stuck—it was a humid day, so we assumed the wood in the door had expanded in the frame. Lab asst. Wilson went to help him, and was able to open the cabinet almost immediately, though it did creak and groan in its housing. Wilson slid the door shut to let the subject resume the experiment, but once again when he tried to pull he found it stuck. This time he would not be helped. He braced against the cabinet and wrenched, flinging the cabinet open. The force of this action caused the cabinet to rock backward, then forward, sending all the blocks spilling onto the floor.

At first I didn't count this as an expulsion, as it had been a result of outside factors, but it became clear in the subsequent trials that whatever was happening here was a symptom of the same phenomenon; the subject could not open the cabinet without the contents falling on him. In every instance, whatever we tried, either the blocks fell or the door didn't open. In one case there was a small earthquake (not unusual for the area) at the exact moment he pulled the door open.

We had just set up the blocks to try again when a colleague of mine came in to ask a question, drawing the attention of myself, the subject, and the two lab assistants. When we looked back to the cabinet, the blocks had changed position: they were stacked haphazardly against the door, leaning in a way that they would clearly fall it was opened. The subject opened the door and the blocks tumbled out.

Even as I write this my mind spins with questions. What is causing this? How? Why? It seems to me that perception is somehow key here. It was only when we started with the curio cabinet, when we could clearly see what was going on inside, that the phenomenon stopped allowing the subject to open the cabinet. Then, when no one was looking, it rearranged the contents of the cabinet completely. I hypothesize that what happened when we weren't looking is the same thing that always happens when the cabinet is opaque. I have no idea how to test this hypothesis, however, without observing it.

2/10/87

Experiment 2

Hypothesis: the phenomenon will rearrange the contents of the curio cabinet if it knows the subject will open it, and no one is watching.

The blocks were stacked in the cabinet. The cabinet was closed. Everyone turned around. When we looked back, the blocks had been stacked against the glass. The subject opened the door and the blocks were expelled. We tried this many times, and found that the blocks had to be unobserved for about 5 seconds before they would be rearranged.

It was lab asst. Hendrix who first posited that we might use this phenomenon as a predictor. We stacked the blocks in the cabinet. Hendrix said aloud, "I am going to flip this coin. If it's heads, [subject] will open the cabinet. Tails, Wilson will open it." We turned away for 5 seconds. When we turned back, the blocks were unmoved. Hendrix flipped the coin, and it came up tails.

We tried this over a hundred times, and using the cabinet we were able to predict the results of the coin flips with perfect accuracy.

2/11/87

We knew the next logical step, but I think we put it off to today because we were nervous. We didn't know what it would mean. I don't know what it means.

We performed the cabinet ritual (as we are now calling it) and the blocks stacked themselves against the glass. Hendrix said aloud "I am going to flip this coin one hundred times. If at any time I get a tails, Wilson will open the cabinet. If I reach a hundred, [subject] will open it.

Hendrix proceeded to flip one hundred heads in a row.

—

It was at this point that I realized I was out of my depth. I seem to have stumbled upon a way to influence probability. It's as if I'm holding luck hostage. What are the implications of this? What does it mean for physics, for the laws of nature? What are the ethics of influencing an outcome in this way? Couldn't this be used to inflict terrible harm? I think you, Dr. Foster, are more used to asking these kinds of questions than I am, so I hope this situation piques your interest enough to bring you down to Berkeley.

I already know it will.

Sincerely,

Dr. John Livingston

Ed. note: The edges of this letter are stained with blood.

[deadletterpost]

tally, 10/6

i am building a machine out of paper. instead of wires it uses pencil and instead of electricity it uses words. the machine is unfathomably complex. the pattern of the stars told me how to build the machine. now i am folding and creasing and origami-ing. now i am cutting and pasting and gluing. this part unfolds like a pop up book, but i can not open it right now. that would mess up the machine. the part i am having the most trouble with is the words that power the machine. the stars do not speak in words, so they can not tell me what to say. i have tried many words but none of them have worked exactly right. its ok though, i will keep trying. the stars are not in any hurry. when the machine is done i will be able to tell any one what to do and they will do it. the machine is not a mind control machine. they will do what i say because they will want to win the favor of the man who built the machine. this part is made of delicate strips of paper, twisted and woven together exactly as the stars told me to do it. i do not know how the machine works. i trust the stars. all i know is what will happen when it is done. i will let them do what i say, but it will not make a difference. everyone will be judged fairly before the stars.

[deadletterpost]

Mr. Henry Delaney, 10/26/2016

Dear Mr. Delaney,

While we appreciate your interest in our company, we regret to inform you that we cannot offer you the Project Manager position at the West Palm-McMillan company.

This is a deviation from the usual rejection letter, but I feel it's my responsibility to inform you that if you want to be considered for this or any position, anywhere, you need to dramatically change your approach to job interviews. We expected this interview to be more of a formality—your resume was impressive, your references checked out, and over the phone you were well-spoken and intelligent. But the way you behaved in the office was (and we spent half an hour workshopping this description, so understand we are not exaggerating) bizarre, bordering on unhinged.

Normally, I would say we hope you apply again in the future, but to be honest we hope never to see you again. If anything, we hope you retreat to an unpopulated area and live out your days as a hermit so that no human ever has to interact with you again. It will take weeks of cleaning and years of trauma counseling to undo the damage you did to our offices, and there are some things I fear may never recover. The men's restroom, for instance now smells so overwhelmingly of lavender that it is impossible to breathe in there. The smell doesn't seem to come from anywhere in particular, nor does it dissipate over time; the restroom is just like that now. There's also the matter of the vultures that now fly in wide, slow circles over our building. Day or night, rain or shine, the vultures circle, waiting for something I can't bear to imagine. I can't prove they're related to your interview, but they weren't there before you showed up, and they are now.

And this isn't even considering the prophecy you left us with; that will be a permanent shadow over our company until it's resolved. It doesn't matter how many group retreats or team building exercises we do, we'll never stop looking over our shoulders for that "blue-eyed boy encircled by the moon" you warned us about.

Good luck in your job search, and may your shadow never blacken the West Palm-McMillan Company's door again.

Regards,

Liam Gladstone, Dept. Human Resources

[deadletterpost]

Harry Thiessen, 3/11/2015

Hey Harry,

Hope you're doing well Hope you're staying safe OK honestly I don't know what to wish for you. Obviously I hope you're doing well, but I don't know, I guess it feels kinda tone deaf. Like "Hope you're just not in prison anymore! Kisses!" I guess my hope for you is that you're doing as well as can be expected. Anyway, I'm attaching a card Gracie made for you. She asked if you would hang it on your fridge and I said I didn't think you had a fridge but I knew you'd appreciate it. She's not what you'd call a natural talent, but she's definitely got a healthy appetite for attention.

Hey, do you remember when we were kids, mom took us to see that play in the park, You Can't Take It with You? It's about a family and they're all kinda kooky and stuff. It started raining pretty hard halfway through act one and they ended up having to cancel the show. Well I'm going to tell you something now that I've never told anyone before. Not exactly a secret, just something I've been too embarrassed to say.

I think I may be stricken with the very specific curse that I can never seen act three of that play.

If I'm counting right, I've seen the beginning of You Can't Take It with You five times now, and I have never made it to the start of the third act. Honestly! It feels too unlikely to be a coincidence!

The first time you'll remember, the rain in the park. The second time was in college: my friend Alice (you guys met at my birthday party I think) was in it, and it was free to students, AND I remembered I'd missed the end the first time, so I was excited to see it. Well, some time in the second act someone called in a bomb threat on the building and they had to stop the show and get everyone out so the bomb squad could come in and do a sweep. (They didn't find anything by the way. I heard a rumor later that a girl who hadn't gotten the part she wanted called it in to ruin the show. I don't know if it's true, but I knew the girl in question and it definitely would have been on brand.)

The third time was at a community theater in Milwaukee, when I was living down there. I was so excited when we got the intermission (between acts two and three) to find out how it wraps up, but when I turned my phone on I had three missed calls from my boss, so I freaked and called him back immediately. It turned out to be nothing! he just forgot his computer password! But by the time I'd walked him through turning the monitor on and navigating to the login screen, the show had already started again and they wouldn't let me back into the theater!

The fourth time, and I'm not making this up, one of the actors was stabbed in the first act. Some nut just dodged security, climbed up on stage and stabbed the guy in the stomach. It was terrifying, obviously, but I also couldn't help feeling guilty. Like, maybe it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been there. I know that's silly. Conceited even, to believe the world somehow twists itself around my presence like that. But I couldn't shake the feeling. For what it's worth, the actor survived; the guy who stabbed him, it turned out, had been stalking one of the actresses for a few months, and he thought killing his perceived rival would win her love or something. Did I retroactively make him think that?

After that I didn't much feel like seeing You Can't Take It with You. Turns out seeing a guy get stabbed is pretty traumatic, and that alone would probably have turned me off of it. But coupled with the nagging idea that something terrible might happen, and it would be my fault, it was enough to make me never want to see it again. But then last week Patrick from work invited me and Gracie to go see it with him.

I really like Patrick. He's kind, and he makes me laugh, and he's great with Gracie. And here he was, trying to share this thing he loves with me and my daughter, and what am I supposed to say? "I can't, I'm cursed?" so we went with him.

It was another theater in park production, like the one we saw as kids, only this one was in kind of an outdoor amphitheater with a roof, so even if it did rain the show would continue. it was a matinee; we brought sandwiches and had a picnic and watched them set up, and it was perfect. Blue sky, warm sun, cool breeze. Patrick and Gracie playing I spy. And then the play started.

At first it felt great. Under all the weird baggage, I'd forgotten that it's a funny play, and this was a good production. The actors nailed the comedy without going overboard. (You know how sometimes you can tell an actor is just milking the crowd for all the attention they're worth? Anyway) But the longer I watched, the more I began to feel this sort of knot of dread tightening in my stomach. I tried just to focus on the play, but I couldn't stop wondering what horrible thing would interrupt it this time. All the worst scenarios started flashing through my head: Maybe this time the bomb isn't so imaginary. Maybe someone decides to try out their new assault rifle. Maybe a freak tornado comes up and blows us all away. I kept imagining Gracie being hurt, and living the rest of my life knowing it was my fault. So I left. In the middle of act two I told Patrick I had migraine and I was going to the car to lie down.

Maybe it's all in my head. Maybe there's no curse. Probably there's no curse. But I just couldn't risk it.

Anyway. Hope you don't think I'm insane now. Feels good to write it all down. Like therapeutic or something. I kinda didn't realize how much I'd been holding that in.

I came up with something to hope of you: I your good days are long and your bad days are short.

So much love,

Rose

[deadletterpost]

Anna Lundquist, 2/13/2021

dear Anna,

you asked me to keep you up to date, so here you go. it'd be easier if you just got an email address, but I guess I understand your reasons. anyway. hope you're doing well. let me know if you want me to send anything with my next letter. packet of pop rocks? I bet those are hard to find out there.

anyway, I wanted to tell you about my new job. you know I've been pretty desperate for work, with quarantine and my mom and etc. etc. and anyway, I finally got a position at this media company, QRT media systems ltd. (they insist on saying the whole thing every time they refer to it). it's better pay than anything else I was looking at and fully remote, which means I can stay home with ma. so my official job title is "microcontent headline writer" which I guess I assumed was gonna be some kind of social media thing, like writing tweets or something? but it's a lot weirder than that.

so my first day on the job I'm on a zoom call with the new boss and a few other recent hires. and this guy is like someone out of, like, a really intense and graphically violent political thriller. he's wearing a full suit and tie in his home office, he's got the most chiseled jawline I've ever seen, and these insanely blue eyes (I'm sure I'd have called them "piercing" if I met them in real life). He talks low and fast, and he says everything like it's an urgent secret that he's letting you in on because he has no other choice. does not smile at all. doesn't even un-clench his jaw. oh, and the dude is absolutely built. like could-kill-you-with-his-fist shaped. I was seriously glad I wasn't meeting him in person.

so anyway. he says (and I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "your job is to write headlines that people will want to click. you will be evaluated by how many clicks each of your headlines receives. do not worry about what happens after they click: that is someone else's job. you have a maximum of 280 characters per headline." and then he logs off. that's it.

I seriously thought about quitting when I figured out the whole job was just writing clickbait headlines, but I can't afford to be picky and like I said, the money is pretty good. so I got to work. my first efforts were absolute trash. I honestly don't even want to share my first few, they're so weird and awkward, but my fifth attempt was "you won't believe this one weird trick to keeping your nails healthy!" a lot of my early ones are like that. they're not, like, offensive or anything, just not very interesting or compelling. I don't even know what I was thinking for that one. do you worry about your nail health? I don't.

here's the thing though: your headlines go up as soon as you submit them. they're not reviewed or proofread or anything like that. they go straight to the audience in the form of ads, chumboxes, promoted tweets, etc. you don't even have to attach pictures. they have some kind of algorithm or something that just picks a stock photo based on your words. the point is, almost as soon as you're done with a headline, you can see how well its performing. you can experiment, get a sense pretty quickly of what works and what doesn't, what kinds of things people click for and which things they don't care about. it's like a game.

around my 50th submission I tried a new format. "we didn't meet our cousin's new wife until they day of the wedding. she was nice, but there was something off about her. then when the priest asked for objections, a man in the back row raised his hand. when he was done, none of us could look her in the eye." I'd been seeing that format around lately, and it seemed promising: what's more enticing than an incomplete story? and it worked! within minutes it was doing better numbers than my previous headlines had done in days. so I did more. a lot more. I won't write out the full catalogue, but I'll tell you one:

"my husband and I were at the store when we saw a man in the frozen meats section. he would open the freezer, take out a package, bend over it, then put it back. we thought he was reading the labels, but then we got closer. when we realized what he was doing, we called the police."

this wasn't my best performing one, but it's probably my favorite. I think there's something visceral and freaky about tampering with grocery store meat. is he poisoning it? putting razor blades in it? fucking it? no one knows. it's a made up story. plus it's got the added bonus of being exactly 280 characters, which is always satisfying.

so that's what I've been doing. writing the beginnings of stories to make people click. it's more fun than I expected: that feedback loop of incrementally improving your clicks is pretty satisfying once you get into it. it's a little exhausting too, though, emotionally speaking. I basically spend all my time trying to trick people, and you realize pretty quickly that people are easiest to trick when you exploit their worst instincts. they click more for fear than for joy, and they click the most for hatred or anger. I guess it's not that surprising, but it starts to feel gross when you have the objective, numerical data.

but I got my first paycheck yesterday and let me tell you, in terms of releasing muscle tension, another month of financial security is better than any massage therapist could hope to be.

All my love,

Lena.

PS: I tried a few iterations of "Fans SHOCKED! Melissa McCarthy dead at 49" but they didn't play as well as I had hoped.