Letter from camp

I have heard from my old camp correspondent Herman Melville. As always, I present his epistle unedited.

Dear Mr. Menick:

You are fine. So am I.

Things are winding down here at WTF. This year I was appointed chief confessor, in addition to my previous positions as pizza chef and laundry lieutenant. Let me tell you, it is one dirty business, listening to the sins of debaters. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but the pay is good and the hours, while long, are all spent in a little closet where you can occasionally catch up on your sleep and hide out from the camp officers who might want you to go polish sneakers or something, so I really can’t complain. And some of these debate sins…va-va-VOOM!

But, of course, my vows prevent me from telling you any of them. Tant pis, as they say in various French circles. But I will drop a hint: new in the two is the least of them!

This has been a pretty exciting summer, overall. As you know, we have a three week camp, but we send the ribbon clerks home after two weeks and just hold on to the hardcore for week three. These hardcore classes are conducted entirely in French, which means that no one, including the lecturers, understands them, but that isn’t much different from the classes that were conducted in English, so it’s not that big of a problem. In the first two weeks we tell everyone to argue the resolution and to uphold their values, but in week three we tell them how to really win, which requires spikes, spreads, critiques, and generous pourboires for the adjudicators, not to mention a little baksheesh in the direction of the tab room, a tradition to which I understand you are no stranger yourself [wink wink nudge nudge]. Week three also marks our traditional Camp Wiener Roast; this year the Camp Wiener was Biscotti Abramowitz, a rising junior from a semi-lingual high school in Chicago who, I assured you, tasted delicious slathered in barbecue sauce.

As you know, our camp is near the ocean. In fact, after a minor earthquake, we were even closer to the ocean than we had ever been before. Our staff behaved admirably during this natural semi-disaster, demonstrating to the assembled campers the power of extemporaneous prayer in quite a dramatic fashion. Craven Savage, after it was over, changed his or her name to Moral Naif, but unfortunately had to be taken to the hospital for falling too quickly on his or her knees at the first sign of the apocalypse. Your chum Mr. O’C, on the other hand, was a brick through the whole ugly mess. Or something that sounds very much like that; it was hard to understand what Mr. Don’t Forget You Had Beets for Dinner Last Night was shouting into his bricked iPhone at the time. As for me, I was awarded a Junior G-Man badge by the local constabulary, which just goes to show you that you can’t keep a good man down even a little bit, except for “The Batman,” who at least hasn’t acquired some silly Spider-Manly hyphen yet. One thing about DC, they don’t go throwing perfectly good punctuation around willy-nilly.

Once the summer is over I will be looking for a coaching job on the east coast. So, apparently, will every college freshman who ever wrote an aff in the last four years, so you can expect a lot of people to be knocking on your proverbial door looking for work. You may remember not hiring me last year, or the year before, or, for that matter, the year before that, but I do not necessarily see a pattern there that we need to worry about, so I’ll be scheduling an interview with you probably next week. I look forward to seeing you again.

Your friend,

Herman Melville
WTF Chief Confessor
WTF Pizza Chef
WTF Laundry Lieutenant
Junior G-Man