24 November 2025
To:Evangeline Morcant
Schillerstraße 17
D-10827 Berlin,Germany
Subject: What is miscellaneous?
By its very essence, it means mixed, combined, a collection of stuff that somehow ended up in the same miserable heap. This was explained to me at length by someone who cared way too much for their own good, far more than I ever could. He spent hours clarifying the terms. Definitions were offered. Examples were provided. At one point, even diagrams were drawn. He loved the idea more than life itself, it seemed, and I loved it less with every passing second. I listened with the expression of a man waiting for a train that had already passed, and eventually realized I had no idea what he was going on about. Not for lack of effort. He simply had too much enthusiasm, and I had too little patience.
Faced with this realization, I did what any rational adult does when cornered by conviction. I nodded. I smiled strategically. I agreed at moments that felt structurally important. It worked.
Enthusiasm, once validated, rarely checks credentials. Somewhere in this process, Miscellaneous became a magazine. Containing
photographs of things I don't fully understand, arranged in a way that suggests intention. Andrew, for reasons only he fully understands, was deeply passionate about the whole ordeal. Passion has a way of migrating responsibility, and by the time I noticed, it had been dumped on my desk.
Which is how I found myself here, editing something I neither proposed nor prevented. Apparently, I am good at this, much to my own misfortune. Andrew had been working on it for ages, and I had mostly forgotten it existed. Then, without warning, it appeared.
I attribute my position entirely to failing upward in a system that rewards mild competence by increasing its exposure.
If there's any divine karma I'm paying for, the offense has to be minor. I may have interrupted the wrong person mid-thought, potentially asked a question that implied interest where none existed, nodded once too often, or smiled at the wrong conclusion.
There's also the strong possibility that I accidentally spat in someone's coffee, not as a deliberate act, but simply due to an unfortunate combination of laughter and bad timing. These things happen. They shouldn't follow you, but sometimes they do. Whatever the offense, it was clearly logged, filed, and then acted upon.
The universe has a remarkable memory for minor infractions and an aggressive response time.
thereof.
What you are about to witness is either raw talent or the lack thereof. The material has been assembled. If you choose to take this seriously, well thats on you. If you don’t, well thats probably much healthier. I’ll be here regardless.
So what is Miscellaneous? Well, I guess the real question is,
Who's asking?
