Los Angeles, California
August 1, 2000

Dear Readers,

Last Saturday evening, when I sent out the sixth weekly issue of Open Letters, I wrote, in the accompanying email to subscribers:

This week’s issue of Open Letters is bigger than usual. Call it a summer double issue, even though we’re not skipping out next week.

That was, perhaps, in retrospect, a bit hubristic. We’re still not skipping out on this week – there are many letters still to come – but we’re skipping out on a new letter today, and leaving Michael Welch’s letter up for an extra day.

We could explain that the official Open Letters laptop keeps overheating, requiring it to be placed in the fridge, once every couple of hours, until it’s been nicely chilled, and that it’s not always easy to provide content in a situation like that. But that would be defensive, and there’s no need to be defensive about leaving a letter as fine as Michael’s up for forty-eight hours.

For those readers who feel a dire need for additional Open Letters content, perhaps today would be a good day to revisit Blue’s letter, or Lynn’s, or to spend a little time with Todd Strandberg, maybe see where his Rapture Index stands now.

Or, if you’re looking for something new, you could take a trip over to this web site, where I spent an inordinate amount of time on Sunday night (I got there through a link on Michael Welch’s site). It is an elaborately hyperlinked history of a one-year period in the life of a house on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia, occupied (for that year) by a group of young women known as “The Malvern Girls.” It’s a compelling tale (all told by a participant known only as “the Gus”) of Robitussin abuse, incompatible zodiac signs, and love gone wrong. It is told mostly in the form of a glossary. It is, truly, what the web was invented for.

Also, as I said yesterday:

Today’s letter is by Michael Welch, an editorial assistant at the St. Petersburg Times, in Florida, where he writes occasionally about entertainment.

Michael is also the proprietor of his own web site, Commonplace – An On-Line Journal, where he writes about life as a young man on the Gulf Coast. It’s an interesting and very readable experiment in literary honesty; as Michael explains in one entry, “I want to write about the parts of myself that people might find distasteful.”

I don’t know much more about Michael than what I’ve read on his site, and intoday’s letter; his letter came to me over the electronic transom. But given the way that he writes, I feel that I know him pretty well already.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough