Alakazam!
If you listed my Probe article publication dates chronologically, you will see that once I started it was off to the races. I had an acceptance rate in the high 90s and I was submitting at least once a week during busy times, but never fewer than once a month.
But then, suddenly you see a five-month gap between articles.
Was the Probe slowing its publication schedule? Was my quality slipping? Or—just a wild guess—did I accidentally send a highly critical email to the owner/publisher/editor, listing all of his and his publication’s faults in rather insulting language?
That last one seems a bit specific, doesn’t it? That’s because that’s what happened.
I have mentioned before that my brother got me interested in both the TopFive list and in The Daily Probe. Before I was writing for Probe, Brian was published in it regularly, and this continued during my run of success. Sadly, I didn’t save off all of his articles, but you can see his work when we both appeared in the same issues.
As well as we were both doing, though, we both resented the occasional rejection of our simply fantabulous articles. We would share our rejected articles with each other via email, and commiserate over the vagaries of editors. Well, one time, probably along about June or July of 2001, Brian sent me his latest reject. I thought it was really good, and in my reply I told him so. I also lamented, at length, the direction in which Probe was going. I probably griped about their leftist bias and their reliance on political snark and potty-mouth humor, among other things.
And then, as one does, I sent the email not to Brian but directly to the owner/publisher/editor of Probe! It was incredibly stupid on many counts. First, I must have fired up a new email instead of replying to Brian’s email. Stupid. Second, I had typed “Chris White” so many times in my screed that I had his name on the brain and I typed that in the “to” line of the email, it auto-filled Chris White’s email address, and I didn’t notice. Stupid. Third, I instantly hit “send” without slowly reviewing the whole email. Super-stupid!
After sending it, I glanced at my “sent” folder and thought, “Hmmm, how did an email from Chris White get there?” Then I realized—it was an email from me to Chris White! I had no way to claw it back.
I instantly sent Brian an email informing him of what I had done. He acted like it was no big deal, but I’m sure he must have regretted getting me involved with him and his pals at Probe. I don’t know if he contacted Chris White separately, but I hope he did and I hope he said, “That Chris Jones—my brother—what a maroon. I disavow him.”
I then sent a follow-up to Chris White in which I first jokingly blamed my email on my evil twin, Rigoberto. But then I reverted to plain old apology mode, and told him honestly that this was simply me blowing off steam as a result of not getting published as often as before. I did all kinds of butt-smooching, even taking the blame for not writing well enough to get published as often.
Chris White accepted my apology in the spirit in which it was offered, and all was forgiven.
Not.
What I got in reply from Chris White was his and the other editors’ pent-up hatred of me and my writing! He claimed that they had only published my stuff to fill out issues when they were short of content. He also highlighted some of my tendencies such as relying on the opening line “<person> didn’t set out to be <type of person>, it just turned out that way,” and other supposed foibles. He lambasted my political views as represented by my articles.
In short, he did a better job of roasting me than he ever did of satirizing anything else, such as, you know, the news.
I replied with some heat, pointing out that his idiotic reply proved the points I had meant to send to Brian, which was that it was a crying shame that the operator of a satirical publication didn’t recognize intentional satire when presented with it, and that all of my supposed unintentional “foibles” were elements of a conscious satirical style, which he failed to grasp because he was so blinded by tee-tee and doo-doo language. I questioned the rationale for putting out a knee-jerk leftist newspaper that did not, in fact, satirize either the media or the subjects of news stories.
Needless to say (but here goes), my next month’s worth of submissions never saw the light of day.
I say “needless to say” but in fact it didn’t have to go that way. Yes, I really served them up in my email intended for Brian. But we were all adults. I would not expect them to agree with me or to like what I had written or to instantly reward me for it. But come on. You have to admit, failing on such a monumental scale by sending that kind of email directly to the people I was lambasting—you gotta laugh at that. I wrote earlier that, as operators of a purported humor rag, they displayed exactly zero capacity for humor.
I meant my critiques seriously, but I still craved publication. So after a month of rejection, then several months of not trying to write anything, I came up with a brilliant plan.
I would lie.
Specifically, I would create a new contributor. It wouldn’t be enough to simply make up a name and start submitting, though. I needed to give my imaginary contributor a CV that would make him irresistible to Chris White.
Thus was born Steve Meckleburg.
I created a Yahoo! account under that name. Then I sent a letter of inquiry to Chris White, asking if “I” could contribute articles. He replied in the affirmative, but as I knew he would, he asked me to introduce myself on the mailing list. I did so, informing everyone that I lived in Canada, having moved there due to troubling political developments in the US. I no longer had US citizenship; instead, I had dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship. My goal with the Israeli citizenship, I said, was to work within the system to help peacefully resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner fair to all, especially to the downtrodden Palestinians. It was only by having skin in the game with my historical homeland that I could credibly criticize either side (but especially the Jews).
My US-renouncing, Jewish-but-Palestinian-loving bona fides prompted an ecstatic welcome from all and sundry. I was in!
I thought to myself, “Self, should you maybe start writing differently so they won’t suspect that that nasty old Chris Jones—whose work we despise—is trying to pull a fast one on us?”
Nah. I knew for a fact that they would not have published my dozens of articles if they really thought they were as bad as they tried to claim. I knew I was good, and that any claim to the contrary was a Fibber McGee.
I didn’t submit very many articles from that point on, but my acceptance rate as Steve Meckleburg was a healthy 100%. This was gratifying in that it fulfilled my desire for publication, and also in that it put the lie to the editor’s takedown of my writing.
Boing!