Receiving Me? held a staff meeting April 4, 2008. For those keeping track at home, that’s three fake staff meetings, one real staff meeting. However, similar to most of the fake meetings, this meeting was poorly attended: only founders Bernard Bygott and Leslie Fox showed up, and given his small brain size and penchant for lengthy staring competitions with inanimate objects, Bernard doesn’t really count. Nevertheless, despite the tragic circumstances, certain proposals were made by the two founders that will, in all likelihood, be ignored out of hand, or laughed at for comfort’s sake. Some of the proposals included: filling the magazine with new content weekly, posting videos that preview our ingenious feature film ideas, reading articles more than once to check for typos and total indecipherability, hiring an editor so that we wouldn’t have to check for typos and total indecipherability, quitting our “jobs” so that we could have more time to put off writing articles filled with typos and total indecipherability, assassinating certain members of the Phillies pitching staff (unrelated, but still important and discussed at length), creating article category names that are actually helpful to our readers, acquiring readers, wondering if the hypothetical editor would count as an additional reader, insulting the staff writers who have yet to write any articles, admiring their willpower, sanity, and unblemished names, swearing that we would actually do some of this proposed stuff, mocking the idea of “doing stuff”, etc. All in all, it was an unusually productive Receiving Me? affair, that is to say, it happened.

But all of this planning, and unplanning, and self-derision got me thinking. Why create a fake magazine that no one reads? After all, there are already fake magazines out there that people do read, and as co-founder Fox so aptly pointed out, during our fourth/first meeting, “Those magazines are written by professionals.” I guess this is the sentence where I’m supposed to say something clever that justifies the existence of this unintelligible rag, or at least makes it appear for one fleeting moment to be slightly more useful than an emergency appendix transplant, but we all know that I’m not going to do that, because that would be impossible. This magazine is precisely as useful as an emergency appendix transplant, no more, no less. In fact, we recommend that our readers take the same drugs and approach things with the same attitude as those patients willing to go through major surgery in order to replace a completely useless organ; remember attitude alone is not enough… you also need the drugs.

I believe it was the great Yogi Berra who once said, “It aint over ‘till it’s over.”, “If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.”, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”, and “I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.” The point is, sometimes it’s not the thought that counts, but the count that thoughts- I think that made a lot more sense in my head yesterday, when I was hopped up on frog acid. Take two: I guess the real point is that sometimes you need to replace a useless organ with an equally useless organ in order to figure out just how much you needed that useless organ to begin with. We here at Receiving Me? understand your useless needs, and whenever possible we try to fill those needs with our empty offerings. Every once in a while we screw up and write something with actual content, or insight, or worth, but mostly we don’t. In that regard, we stand head, shoulders, heals and toes above all those professionals! You could say, “that’s our badge of honor!” but then you’d be saying it about yourself and not us, which would be wrong.

‘Till next time… keep it empty, keep it useless!