Titrations

Residual heat comes from the western wall of a masonry building long after the sun is slunk below the furthest twig of pavement you see. Lean against it; feel it creep around under your shirt like a microscopic domesticated mammal. Pick a star and start there counting. Lose track as clouds.

Wile the way down steps toward your door and put on anything. Sounds of some kind. Turn off all light and then turn back pretend or hope the dark smoke clears with the switch. Strip. Sit at your desk on cold metal. Pimple at the pricks of your follicles and their cells and their nerves. Put on layers of the nicest thing you own. Fill with smoke. Sweat.

Figure the ocean has answers. Ask the questions. Get only waves in reply.

Figure the sidewalk talks. Go five miles and take the bus back. Diesel.

Figure a bottle sings. Play the flute of it; the jaw harp of it.

Palpitate your corners, joints, joists, abutments.

Focus your myopia on grid and dictionary. Compose yourself; look straight.

Moment passes. She leaves without so much as asking you to call tomorrow or suggesting that she will. And so you lean against the still, hot bricks. Your high school chemistry would crystallize a laundry blue liquid into flakes of silver with the addition of something in equal proportions mole and catalyst. Now the precipitate is words but they walk towards cabs and buses opposite where you are sitting subterranean or suborbital: windowed in.

To crystallize these things. The microscopic sensations off the bricks, the appearance of a footprint drying on the sidewalk, the light reflecting on and off of the acrylic lines on the road as cars pass. Where ordinarily your solipsism would permit your reticence there is found a glowing wad of extroversion.

Scour surface for answer. The Internet and it’s Whitmanic lists and shopping malls and those malls’ lists. Part and parcel enigma of emotion to satisfy character count. Slowly slowly dissolve the usefulness of pixel and bandwidth axle.

Question arises moonwise as while you sit next to the speakers on loud and want to crawl into them and walk in circles around the grooves of the record with the guitars and synths following you like ivy and sunlight.

The artifice of intention realizes itself in a heap of fur at the foot of your bed and the motion of moment is the liquid your brain and the hot room and the condensation of alcohol and the tap of  beat and bass in your subterranean or suborbital room.

Photographs do not have wind, paintings do not have dust, a song does not have temperature. Artifice of artifice all things are artifice.

Swimming pool deep end of room by the drain hover. Calculate and extrapolate formula upon panic attack worth of figures to cram this into a bottle that you can hurl out into the hot street to break and splash and dry and break again in the thunder of the storm you see out over New Jersey.

The Mortician: An Essay on Writer's Block

It is raining. This is melting the snow. It took a few good days of rain to finally melt last year's two feet of snow and that came around March. It is January and it snowed two days ago. This snow is gone already. 

I had started mending my friend's parents' lawn today. Maybe this is why I falsely believe it is spring. I put on a worn out shirt and my cowboy-tight, ripped work jeans. It was like theolddays. April. Mucking a golf course east of Wichita before undergrad on the east coast. 

It is muddy here in this Staten Island yard; not as muddy as the trenches of Kellogg, nor as silty but overgrown and reeking of years of rotting peaches from a lone, diminutive, un-pruned tree. Mulberries poke their heads out through weeds like rye. These must be cut by me and cut again and cut again. It rains harder.

Harder. Hard enough to dampen my clothes faster than my body heat can dry them out. I retire to my car. Tilting the seat toward Kill van Kull where a ship passes. I doze with my knees poking through their well-deserved holes. I doze like theolddays only, now, I don't get paid for lounging. Rain means another day I have to wait for a check. This keeps me from dozing. I head for coffee. Find some at a deli. It is terrible. 

I hope some voodoo or wishful thinking will clear the rain. I am paid by the job not the hour now. It kills me to wait here as opposed to theolddays where I would sleep in the heat, my check trickling up like a broken sprinkler-head futilely trying to nurse a new berm. 

I suck the coffee through the hole in the lid; let the windows blur. I go in and let Mrs. Spinelli know I will be back in the morning. Another day the check is delayed.

I drive around for awhile in the false spring. I drive deliberately through puddles and listen intently as the water meets the running boards like a dozen snare drums. There are new suspension parts behind my tires, it is good to get the salt off.  Salt begets rust. Rust begets break. Break begets wreck. Wreck begets repair. Repair begets bills. Bills beget a necessity to work with my body again.

This is a writer's problem.

The mind is no use to anyone so the body must be sold. Turn a spade, watch a child or cat or watch many children and be called a professor. My mind is no use to anyone but the mortician. She will dissect my brain and make my poems expensive realizing they are so rare: like diamonds except with less dictators and more women.

Enhance Your Shelf Life NOW: Debunking the Debunking of Sexism

This Salon article would be laughably ignorant if it were not so painfully ignorant. In it, male novelist Teddy Wayne (an author who has written a novel I have never heard of) complains that Jennifer Weiner (author of, apparently, many novels I have never heard of) complains too much. Using some less than artful euphemisms, Wayne argues that Weiner is wrong in her assertion that the New York Times  is "sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance." 

Weiner goes to great lengths to prove her point. If you are like me, however, pictures make a lot more sense than words so here are some from an organization (VIDA) for which I intern. (I am admitting my bias here, see)

VIDA is an organization devoted to women in the literary arts. To boil it down to absolute terms, VIDA is seeking to create a conversation about women writers and cultural perceptions of them and their work. VIDA's most fundamental project is The Count. This is where I come in. As an intern I am in the trenches doing this counting. It sounds straight forward of course, "how many men?" "how many women?" It is not. Often bios do not reveal one's gender. Often names do not either. For example, my dad's name is Alex, so is my female cousin's. Part of a Counter's job is to definitively ascertain the gender of an author. Then we can actually count them. But first! we must figure out how to categorize their work. Is this a literary piece in and of itself? For example a poem in Poetry. Is this a critical piece by one author about another? For example, the contents of the book review section of the Times disclosed above. Whose literature is being talked about? Obviously and as expected, mostly men. There is another pie chart to accompany this one over on the official count page. It is reveals whose opinions about literature (the reviewers) are being published. Again, as expected, mostly men.

I should be able to stop here because the point is made fairly clear by all the incredibly straight forward evidence that VIDA presents. Unfortunately, Wayne somehow read all this and came to a different conclusion. Look at the above pie chart one more time. Seriously, I'll wait. Study it. Got it? Okay now read this:

 In short, midlisters are middle-class professionals scraping out a living — and being a midlist male author who writes about males is a distinct financial disadvantage. Not only will you not get reviewed in the Times, but you won’t get reviewed in the women’s magazines that drive sales

That thing about women's magazines had something to do with the incredibly condescending view Wayne has about women's book clubs (or something) but the important thing is that he really believes males are reviewed less in the Times. Remember the pie chart, right? Okay.

Wayne did raise a point that VIDA has not looked into or at least has not published any awesome pie charts on: shelf placement. Is Wayne on to something when he moans that if you are a male "Barnes & Noble will relegate you to the back shelves"?


I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt so I looked into it. One of the perks of being an enormous literary nerd with no job is that I also have no friends and so can while away an entire afternoon jotting notes about book shelves and not worry that there is a whole world out there waiting to be grappled with, engaged in and employed by...

Anyway. I really wanted Wayne to be right because if nothing else it would prove that while the scholarly world(we'll call the Times scholarly...for now) overlooks women, maybe the commercial one does not.

I went down to my neighborhood Barnes and Nobel; below are the hard numbers. I started with the front shelves. If the men are all on the back shelves it should be easy to prove Wayne right by just counting the first shelves I see when I walk in. I chose the shelves "New Fiction" and "New Writers" to also look into Wayne's "book-editor-friend's" statement: “When we buy a debut novel by a man, we view it as taking a real chance.”

Hm. Okay, strike one, we'll get this next one.

"Taking a real chance," eh? Okay, strike two. I get three right? (There were only two categories that pertained to fiction and/or new writers but sure, 3 tries it is.)

An entire shelf dedicated to a man? Damn. Guess that make strike 3 right? (Yup, but I'll give you an honorable mention. Janet Evanovich had her own shelf too, right next to the $2 reese's bars under the cashier's stand. Women's literature is evidently equal to that of sugary impulse buys.)

Now that Wayne's little reverse sexism theory has been shot full of holes lets sink this ship for good. But first! Wayne tell us how he really feels:

Yet the Franzen-Weiner-Picoult-Stockett universe is the literary 1 percent; they’re all doing just fine, male or female. If you’re upset that you’re deprived of two separate reviews and a profile in the Times, as Weiner evidently is, then, to quote Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” you have “uptown problems, which aren’t really problems at all.”

Got that, female writers? You should be happy with money. We do not need to have intelligent discussions about women's writing so long as we give them money. Shut up, look pretty, here's a royalty check. Which might explain Wayne's parting shot:

 male authors are somewhat like male porn stars: getting work, but outearned and outnumbered by their female counterparts, who are in far greater demand from the audience

I have no idea what Wayne was hoping to accomplish with his invective. It seems obvious to me that sexism remains an enormous force in this country. The examples are numerous and growing daily. Pick one. All male presidents. All male presidential candidates. Predominately male CEO's. Predominately male editors and on and on and on. I suppose Wayne was more worried about authors that never make it to the B&N shelves but maybe hangout on the St. Mark's shelves. I point you again toward VIDA. The reviews conducted by The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review and Granta all qualify as the "midlist" writers that Wayne was talking about and only one publication (Poetry) covered an equal or greater number of women compared to men. The simple truth is that Wayne (and anyone who believes him) is wrong; blatantly so. And to finish this all up, take a careful look at the author picture on the right. I happen to be a male writer. I am even openly heterosexual. Yet here I am lending my voice to feminism. Clever ploy to get in good with the ladies? No. Resistance against an unfair system which is silently repressing equal expression? Absolutely. If we men are really the great writers all the major journals and critics say we are, we will not mind a little fair competition and discussion with women. Those who defend the status quo have something to be afraid of: their own inadequacy.

Three Week Hunger

I seem to have established a blogging pattern of once every three weeks. I know I am breaking all kinds of rules by doing this. First, I should be doing it once a week, second I shouldn't be making a post about how I never post. 

However, I think self-deprecation is necessary at times and particularly revealing about personality. I think my problem is that I tend to overthink my words. I know that this blog is not read by anyone for world advice or creative insight. Though, that is probably anyone's loss. I mean, the reason I am not here every other day is I do not want to waste my and your time on petty stuff. That is not to say people who do blog more regularly are petty just that if I were to blog that often it would be. 

My writing hunger, occurring only in three week intervals is interesting me and I wonder about the cause. I have reached a few theories about why I come back to this when I do:

• Money. Creativity is a function of contentedness and contentedness is an inverse function of stress. When my bank account is nice and cushiony I have the freedom of mind to write rather than worry about which check needs to clear first.
• Time. I think I play a pendulum game with my leisure time. I give huge blocks of it away to editing my work, other people's work, my magazine, other people's magazines, political causes, environmental causes and bass guitar solos only to later about-face and drop everything to have some personal time, wherein I write.
• Sleep. This one I am still working out. I have had about 1000000 good ideas come to me just before falling asleep and had to pry myself from the warm clutches of my bed. This was a bit of a learning curve. I kept promising to myself that I would write the ideas down in the morning. However I started to realize that they were the beginning of dreams, that is REM stuff spilling into the last remnants of consciousness and if I did not write them I would never see them again. So write I did. Jumped out of bed like I was haunted to get them down. Most are still just ideas but I think they are going places. Other times I cannot make a pen move when I am tired. Others I ramble out forever thinking I am writing the next On The Road to come up with an incoherent piece of crap...which I guess is a lot like On the Road. Right now, I am somewhere in between that REM/incoherrent stage. I am definitely tired but my ideas seem to be coming out well. In fact, this late night post which started as just musing on the strange cycles of my work ethic has actually turned into an analytic Ars Poetica. Which is groovy.
• Decision Fatigue This is some pretty neat new science. It seems to be that the more stuff you have to choose between the worse you get at it. Your mind gets tired and actually stops deciding which usually means defaulting and picking something that was actually picked for you not by you. When it comes to writing there is no default. Every word is a choice and to make even one choice badly can ruin everything. Inhibition certainly plays a part when decision fatigue takes over. How many systems have we derived to work around inhibition? I think of automatic writing, first-thought-best-thought and a rather myriad of mental function inhibitors. Inhibition is just the brain trying to protect you from dying so when you inhibit the brain you take inhibition with it. Neat eh?

So here we have it these are my reasons for avoiding my personal challenges. What are your favorite cop-outs? The first step to recovery is acceptance.

I am not positive about the etymology of the word concerted but it calls to mind the image of many things working together to produce one thing more forceful than simply their sum. This marks the beginning of a concerted effort by my constituent parts to work together to make this blog my writing better than I am probably qualified for.

A Brief History of Caleb Ross

I can only personally account for roughly three years of Caleb's life. The other details of this history have been accrued through applying biblical numerology to his blog posts and anecdotes from Creative Writing professors we shared. It should be noted that probably no part of the following history is true but parts of it might be.

• Caleb was born to wandering shepherds Brian and Diana sometime around the reign of Herod II
• Caleb was a precoucious child whose first love was music. It has been said that he was capable of playing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" on a 25 key Schoenhut at age 3.
• For his loyal service to Giovanni Verrazano, a street in Staten Island bears his name.
• To pay for college Caleb sold used office furniture to an up-and-coming Greg Daniels. 
• Caleb took the only known photograph of Helen of Troy. Unfortunately it was shot on a roll of Kodachrome which he forgot to develop before the chemicals were discontinued by Kodak in 2009.
• Caleb converted Jonathan Goldsmith to a full-time Boulevard Wheat drinker.

More amazing than all these is the real life genius of Caleb's writing and his untreated workoholism. When I signed up to participate in this tour it was for two novels. Now it's two novels and a novella. All the while he has been helping other writers revise and publish as well as running numerous blogs, forums and podcasts. If there is something this man can't do it hasn't been invented and done by him yet. Cannoli Pie published an excerpt of Stranger Will here and a review of it here.


The first book of Caleb's I ever read came with a picture of him shirtless holding a guitar. I am not sure what I was supposed to get from that. Perhaps this is related.

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter:@calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb

For more Author Photo Comics fun, click over to the Author Photo Comics tag at Caleb's website.

Word Choice: The First of a Saga

At some point I am going to have to wake up to the reality that I am not going to earn a living selling poems. I am pretty sure the only people who do are the people who translate the Greeks and then sell the books to college literature surveys. This harsh reality has led me to ponder what an English degree can do well that other degrees cannot, besides being able to lick hundreds of manuscript queries a week without getting a single tongue paper cut. The conclusion? Pick words for people and charge for it.

This series is not meant to be a treatise on people confusing their and they're. If you still need help with that you have probably already stopped reading because nothing on this page has exploded yet. Rather, I hope to point out that I can word things better than many people who actually get paid to do it. This blog started as something devoted to the way people misuse a particular word. It quickly had to leave its original calling because the misuse of the word, though flagrant, was not as commonplace as I had at first guessed. Beyond that, the name sounds cool and suggests that I am out to change something. Which I am and now, full circle being reached, we have gotten back to words.

For this first installment I will go with probably the two most abhorrent words I can think of. These two are fine by themselves but together they are like Sid and Nacy: bad for each other and everyone involved.

"a Novel"

I like novels, I know people who write novels and I mean them no harm and so forth but these words have got to go or need to make new friends. Both would be good. 

The problem as I see it is that the words "a Novel" are a threat to my intelligence. 

"Ok, um, err, it's a big thick papery thing at Borders  it's either a novel or a book on tape in a box that looks like a novel." 

Seriously, you don't need to tell me I will figure it out. 

Or is it that you are concerned we will mistake your "novel" for something else? A steaming pile of misogynistic bovine leavings? 

Perhaps.

I just leaned over to my book shelf and checked, yes, a good friend of mine has the words "a Novel" in the title of his novel. I do not blame him but I do sort of blame his publisher. I imagine it was their fault. It is an endemic epidemic really and I doubt that any one person will change it soon and maybe the words themselves do not need to disappear but they could stand some company.

Allow me to widely misquote something if you will. Futurama did a series of straight-to-DVD movies after their first cancellation. The second in this series, The Beast with a Billion Backs was styled after 1950's monster films. The liner notes had a mini "movie poster" that featured the tagline "A MONSTER OF DUBIOUS MORALITY!!!" Which is hysterical, but moving on. Such a tag would go well after "a Novel." Caleb Ross's Stranger Will would do well with that actually. Stranger Will: a Novel of Dubious Morality. 

 

Like I said, I do not think its Caleb's fault that his title has the words novel in it and even if it is I can still chalk that one up to Caleb being a writer of our times. I do not think a writer wants to put "a Novel" after his or her work though. Much the way I do not title my poems "D.B. Cooper, a Poem." I suppose I could start, just to even out the score. I worry that people would be offended by it though. After all I do not need to remind people that it is a poem when

the lines look

like this

and there are

inanimate objects

are carnivorously

personified

and such.

I think "a Novel" is entirely a product of The Marketing Department. I did some very un-academic, non-scientific looking into and reached the conclusion that the newer the book the more likely it is to be called "a Novel." Additionally, product descriptions make those words more important than the author/publisher did. Don DeLillo is a fine example of both points.

This is his novel from the 1980's

This is from 2003

We see "a Novel" has been added to the title of the newer book, yet the subtitle is roughly a quarter the size of the main title. Now look at this picture.

The two parts of the title are now the same size. The latter picture is from a website trying to sell you the book.

J.D Salinger raises another point.

His says "a novel by" which is more of a description than a footnote to the title which is nice. However his "buy now" page on the same website does not remind you that it is a novel. One could argue that it should. DeLillo got the "a Novel" treatment and his was only a tiny blip at the end why is Salinger immune? Is it because we all know that Catcher was a novel and but cannot say the same for Underworld because it is new? Was DeLillo's "a Novel" really part of his title and therefore on the by page whereas perhaps Salinger did not write that it was simply added to the cover? Who knows.

That is sort of my point with this whole thing. Who invited these guys? Perhaps they are of value but I err on the side that they are not. The naked words, usually followed by a colon which indicates description, "a Novel" are a distraction from the art in hand. A title may be the only words you ever read by a given author. It would be nice if those words freely and clearly expressed exactly what the author wants you to know without having to lug around a dangling marketing appendage. 

For those who were holding out for an explosion: here is a simulation of the moon colliding with a theorized sister moon. Read the story in the journal Nature.  

Response to General Overachiever's "Questions" from July 10: Part 2

A few days ago Claire asked her friends the following: 

• When you begin a new project, how do you choose to start? Do you plan it out first, mapping the steps and setting deadlines? Or do you dive in without more than a second thought? And either way, why?

I spent so much time answering the first question I am going to have to do this one separately because it is an important question. It should be noted however that I am not famous or considered any type of expert at anything so if you choose to follow my methods or advice you do so at your own peril.

--

A project for me begins with the most engaging part of the story or poem. I used to call these "thunder bolt lines" because they take awhile to make their impact fully known (think of the flash then the boom) and because I usually end up a little deaf and blind afterwards, that is, I feel sick until I can write it down. That's as close as I get to some magical fairy like muse experience. The rest is all good ol' fashioned elbow grease and maybe a little (read lot of) wine or scotch. 

Recently, the thunder bolts have ended up being titles rather than lines which is interesting to me. 

The elbow grease mentioned is usually research. I haven't been a law enforcement officer or a world renowned painter in a creative rut so I have to read up on it. For this novella like thing I have been writing for a year or so now I intend to do research on painting. The world renown part is all my creative hubris imagining what it will be like when everyone worships and anthologizes me. I am also considering practicing with a handgun at a shooting range for the only novel I can honestly say I have ever attempted to write. They say "write what you know" and you can't know everything, but sometimes you have to write about everything so research, even for creative work, is important. 

Now "writing" for me is a generous term. The above mentioned longer works of fiction are being written mostly in my head at the moment. The novella, actually is entirely in my head and while not concretely productive, it is still important. It prevents the story from being tainted by the wrong kind of critics. I believe in making a story mine before I get it out there. Others probably disagree with me.

Poems are a bit of a different beast. My preferred method of working on a poem is something of an ekphrastic method, i.e. writing about art. I typcially do that not by actually writing poems about pottery or something but by writing poems while or directly after reading the work of a good poet or in many cases the news. I am not sure what the merits of this are but it is fun. 

Finally, I do not pretend to know when a piece is finished. I know what I am trying to get across but I never know if I am getting that through to others. When, and only when, I am certain that a piece might possibly be finished does it see the light of day to anyone but myself and perhaps a first reader. Advice from friends is one way to see where it is and rejection from a magazine or publisher is another. Both are good.


My answer to Claire's final question, the one about organization, should be self evident. 


If not:

Response to General Overachiever's "Questions" from July 10

Claire had some questions for her readers on Sunday and true to my boisterous, opinionated nature I have some (long-winded) answers.

• "Through what medium do you normally express yourself?"

The short conventional answer to that question is that I write but the nature of the writing is very varied. Inter-personal and political topics often manifest in poems I think because it is more accepted for a poem to end without an answer. While the American short story (and to a slower extent the novel) are getting better at being more open ended like their European counterparts it remains true that the average American reader wants stories that have endings. If the situation in North Africa and the Middle East is any proof, political issues tend to drag on and a poem of any length is more easily disposed to openendedness partly because nobody gets poetry anyway. I typically turn to fiction for more tangible things. Sort of like Maury in twelve point Times New Roman, my short fiction emphasizes things like uncouth character traits and relationship flaws.

I have a caveat to this however. I do not really think I am expressing myself in these pursuits. I am expressing perhaps my interests or sympathies but I like to consider myself somewhat more than the sum of these parts.  Creative Non-Fiction has emerged as something of a cousin to short fiction while also being a less dry form of memoir and has been helpful in pointing out that fiction writers are not necessarily autobiographically veiling their lives in their work. Because of the distinction people are less apt to argue that a book is true to the writer's life. The Beats were really good at doing the latter of course and with their prominence in American literature it is possible that they are to blame for the overused "autobiographical" reading of literature. However, it seems that lately writers are doing a better job of keeping their personal lives out of their writing. This is particularly reassuring when one reads characters like Brandon Tietz's Aidin.

Self expression is something of a flower-power term that I would rather steer clear of. Other people probably should too. I certainly do not advocate for repression; I simply prefer an emphasis on more far reaching themes and tones than those of single significance. Think of The Beatles: "You're really only very small and life goes on within you and without you."

Haibun and Small Presses

A quick post before I scamper off to class.

I've discovered a few really rad things that I just had to share.

First of all, my poetry writing class has introduced me to a new form of poetry that I think is simply amazing. It's called "haibun" and as you may be able to tell it is similar to haiku. In fact, it is a form of haiku. It basically involves long, unlineated poetry contrasted with formal haiku (5 - 7 - 5). Many people have given haiku their own spin over time, changing from the normal "nature" theme, changing lines, and even syllable counts, and such changes are seen in modern haibun. I for one, prefer to keep it "old school." It's my opinion that working in the form is a good way to draw out creativity. If you put yourself in a box, this one being 5 - 7 -5, you have limited access to creative tools and are therefore forced to become more creative to get out of that box. Anyway, enough of my opinion. Here are some great examples of haibun that contemporary writers have chosen to loan to the wide world of the internet. Enjoy, and write some of your own!

My second props of today go out to small presses. Specifically SunnyOutside Press. It's a fact that some of the best creative works go unnoticed by the masses and popular opinion for years. Often a talented creative person waits until he or she is dead to be recognized for his or her gifts and contributions to the human experience. Small presses are great stores of creative, brilliant, passionate, but unpopular works. If you're into reading creative work, google small presses, look through what they have to offer and buy a book. Usually a small press work is very cheap. I bought a book of poetry from SunnyOutside titled "State Sonnets" for about $15 after S & H, and have thus far enjoyed the purchase. Can you get anything good for under $20 at a chain book store? Unless Twilight and James Patterson are your versions of good, no. So look for small presses and buy their stuff. Help them stay alive, passion goes a long way to feed the soul of an artist, but they need money to eat and sleep and buy more paper to feed the passion. So buy books! Also worth noting, SunnyOutside didn't just sent me a book they sent me promos and a hand stamped thank you card. If that's not customer appreciation I don't know what is! I get that it's just advertisement and an attempt to buy a repeat customer, but it came in very interesting formats, so props to that.

-titus