Lemon was sitting in a boring tutorial. The tutor was going on about some crappy crap. Suddenly, Lemon couldn’t take it anymore.
It sounds like the start of an interesting story, but it’s not. All that happens next is Lemon kills the people in his tutorial, then the police are called, then Lemon kills the police. The story is crappy, but it brings me to my topic, which is crappy writing.
Now, I’m not naming any names, but everyone who writes for Salient is crap. It used to be that you could expect a certain level of standard from this magazine, back in the day. Before you picked up Salient you would say aloud to yourself, “Wow, I wonder what offensive letters Yule Sukmeov wrote this week” or “Gee, I hope Emilie Le Strange says something funny!” But unfortunately for this year’s reader, Yule Sukmeov killed himself and Emilie Le Strange was boiled and eaten by a pack of hungry cannibals. No, I’m just kidding. Sukmeov was the one eaten by cannibals.
Don’t you dare correct me on this, ed. It’s about damn time that the public learn the awful truth about Sukmeov’s brutal death. Not that I didn’t have my own little part to play in his demise. I was one of those cannibals, and boy was he delicious.
It’s a shame Yule died. He was such a brave man, and very educational. I taught my baby brother to read by reading him extracts from Yule Sukmeov’s letters to Salient. Now little Onion can’t spell for shit and he only knows swear words. But then again that’s the way with most kids these days.
Since Yule’s death (or at least his death from the letters pages, which was the only place he truly lived), people have been trying to fill the vacuum left by his absence. Pseudonyms have popped out of nowhere, all squaring up to be the next Yule Sukmeov. It’s like a WWF Royal Rumble, but instead of dressing up in speedos and whacking each other across the face with deckchairs and then pinning one another, they’re writing nasty letters to the editor. There are a lot of main contenders out there, a lot of young promising potential, such as Critical Critic and “the goliath” Eric Shin. God, that even sounds like a wrestling name. And then there are a lot of underdogs, like scorchinghotmaoriguy.
Call me crazy, but I think it’s kind of wrong for Geoff Briskit to just assume these people are pseudos. I mean, how would you feel if you were just a normal guy called scorchinghotmaoriguy and you wrote to Salient and everyone mocked you and put you in the pseudonyms column? Poor scorchinghotmaoriguy. I bet he had no idea when he sent in his badly spelled and badly punctuated letter that he would be ordered to cut off his hands and bleed over the keyboard. But one thing scorchinghotmaoriguy doesn’t need is pity. Bad punctuation may not be punishable by death, but it ought to be.
How can we just assume scorchinghotmaoriguy is a maori? That’s racist. Personally I am of the opinion that he is a Red Indian. In a Red Indian family, when the father steps out of the teepee on the morning after the child is born, he names the kid after the first thing he sees. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that maybe one day a Red Indian came out of his tent and saw a maori guy walking along, and he said “Whoa, scorchinghotmaoriguy!” and that’s how little scorch got his name.
On a related point, good politicians always start their campaign with a brief statement of policy. It is not uncommon to see an American President wannabe proclaiming from the back of a train, “I will lower taxes.” Pseudos use the same trick. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen the words “First year and mature students – Fuck off” in the letters pages. It’s a good way to let people know where you stand, and I bet it would make a great bumper sticker. I mean, I’d buy one.
To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with the whole pseudonym thing. But I kind of feel bad for all the first years and mature students who get abused just because they are first year and mature students. So here’s my solution: instead of writing about how much you hate first years and want to kill them, write a short poem about God. Also, keep a swear jar by your computer and every time you feel like saying something nasty, make a small donation, say just $1 or $2. That way maybe we can curb the bad language and get back to the real purpose of writing in Salient, which is writing long essays with no point.