Crap Email Critical Readings: Notes On Jared And Maggie
At first glance Jared’s Crap Email to Tom, the co-worker of his former lover Maggie, is a somewhat generic — albeit rather distinctively stilted — example of the “subtle temperature taker,” which is to say, the studiously non-confrontational attempt to gauge the amenability of a former paramour to renewing sexual relations, a once-rich genre that has been glutted with mediocrities as the emergence of applications like Facebook, G-chat and Twitter has all but eliminated the barriers to “re-entry,” if you will, with regard to casual communication with one’s exes.
But awkwardness is merely a smokescreen meant to distract the casual reader from an aesthetic brilliance laid bare in Jared’s opening line:
This is Jared Fitzpatrick, the guy who dated Maggie Sellers last year.
It’s a gratuitous sentiment, of course. Jared is under no illusion that his identity hasn’t been disclosed not fifty pixels lines above by the automated harbinger known commonly as the “From:” field. He repeats his full name, then that of the object of his ambivalent affections, to underscore the extravagant repetition that will mark his deceptively succinct missive — and by extension, love and sex and the human condition, inter alia. Additionally, by introducing himself in such a clumsily formal manner, Jared has subtly endeared himself to the reader, conjuring faded memories of teenage boys stammering their ways through niceties with the stern fathers of girls they intended to ask to the Homecoming dance, and for a moment causing us to forget altogether that said fathers might not be so stern were they not so well aware of the true interests of all boys, which Jared of course shares — and proceeds to confess almost manically in paragraph two, in which he manages to use the word “I” ten times while purporting to inquire about Maggie’s emotional state:
I was going through my email addresses and I came across you and I figured this would be a good way to find out how Maggie is doing. Understandably I’m sure she never wants to see or hear from me again. I always felt that you were a standup guy so I trust you to use your best judgment as to whether or not to tell her that I’ve inquired about her. You know, don’t tell her if it would upset her. I’m not looking to get back together with her. I just would like you to tell me if she is doing O.K. I don’t mean to sound like a self-promoting prick but I believe I hurt her badly. I hope she has put it behind her.
Lest you failed to grasp it the first seven times, Jared screwed over Maggie. He believes he “hurt her badly.” He fears the mere memory of him might still “upset” her. He worries that ten months after he unceremoniously exited her life she might still be less than “O.K.” He hopes she has “put it behind” her, yet he is certain she might never want to see nor hear from him again. All this he deems “understandable.” Jared understands. And yet still he feels; indeed he has always felt — that Tom is a “standup guy” with excellent “judgment” in whom he “trusts.” Indeed it is only within this kinship that Jared could feel so free to check up on the availability of a woman whom he has no interest in ever again dating, and by his own admission doesn’t enter his thoughts when she is absent, except sometimes. Just as Jared understands, Jared knows Tom will understand he doesn’t “mean to sound like a self-promoting prick but I believe I hurt her badly.” And yes, Jared is sufficiently self-aware to realize that when he wields six separate ways of saying “I hurt her badly” in the same paragraph he uses to convene an exploratory committee into the viability of hurting her again, it might come off like some word-of-mouth marketing campaign meant to bolster public perception of his sexual prowess. But dude, as dudes like us know, dudes like us care about as much about self-promotion as we do about whatever ex-girlfriend we’re trying to get the pants off at an given moment. That is just the way things are, and will continue to be, for time immemorial, unless…
And are you doing OK? Married yet? I’m still out there on the prowl and I’m not dating anyone at the moment. If you’d like to go prowling/scamming/trollop hunting sometime just let me know.
And here again Jared’s seemingly-listless redundancies serve to distract from the underlying subtext. To prowl, to scam, to hunt to… prowl some more…it is as ingrained and imperative as breathing! — for men like Tom and Jared and the generations of men before them conjured by Jared’s random-seeming use of the word “trollop,” a word whose last recorded informal usage occurred in 1992 on John McCain’s senatorial campaign trail.* Jared might have invited Tom to accompany him in pursuit of “pussy” or “trim” or “chicks” or “hos” or even “bitchezzz,” but as with all crap emailers Jared’s sins are at least partially absolved by the venerable beauty of the language he uses to remind us his ancestors were shitty boyfriends too, but back in those days you couldn’t use their hilarious missives to subject them to the mockery of thousands of random people on the internet.
*Which by the way, the extra credit for catching why I used his picture to illustrate the post goes to the commenter…”fucking none of them.” Jesus you guys, can we crowdsource ourselves a little institutional “meme-ory” next week, ktksbai.
