This is really neat...
Esquire's Napkin Project has college after school project written all over it but it's pure brilliance!
Read on...
It's an old story, we figured. Someone, in a bar somewhere, scribbling on a napkin in the failing afternoon light; the kind of story or list or note that might be crammed in a pocket and pulled out years later to tell something deep and forgotten -- perhaps life's most intimate first chapter, nearly lost forever. So we gave this spontaneous medium a shot. We put 250 napkins in the mail to writers from all over the country -- some with a half dozen books to their name, others just finishing their first. In return, we got nearly a hundred stories. We present most of them here -- from lush to spare, hilarious to terrifying.


What can we say about R.? He is not special, but he is different. He came to be married, then decided he wanted to fuck other women. He made a choice: One so many men don't make, or refuse to make, or would like to make, until the rosy memories, shot in soft-focus, of the ceremony and St. Croix honeymoon bungalow, set in and the world is right again. "The world is right again"--teachers can't afford to pay their heating bills while CEOs earn eight figures for being C-thinkers with no vision and no intellect, but with firm handshakes, a complete mastery of the encyclopedia of conventional conversational maneuvers, and an ability to brainfuck the gullible and weak, to put them out of business with a smile--Baudrillard's honed and perfectly false "American smile," so to speak. The French know us so well.
About R.'s choice, he thought he'd chosen a good wife, one of average intelligence and reasonable child-birthing ability. Little did he know she would be as fertile as the far-off lands of the orient, from which all major poetic discoveries stemmed, from which the most ethereal fragrances flow upward, away toward a meanness--the point at which they dissipate forever. His three children were fine daughters: seven, five, and three, evenly-spaced; again, we won't make the mistake of talking about children in this text, either. They figure very little into the scheme of things: most men, R. included, are grateful for their children, yet they are almost inconsequential. Lacking gravity of any kind, they are simply not as compelling or tragic as sex, spousal hatred, or professional ennui.
Sonia was not R.'s first love. R. may never have loved her, instead perhaps wooed by her pretty, clear eyes. It is the only shred of evidence that God exists, and that He is malevolent: a woman's eyes, when really beheld, are indeed like the skies of Crete or the deep waters of an Asiatic basin. All possibility exists there, and the possibility is desired, and the desire, then fulfilled, is relegated and forgotten like a folder full of receipts. And so Sonia's eyes reached his own, once, for the first time, and she likely felt "love," and he likely got an erection, and the fifty-millionth imperfect marriage was thereby set in motion.
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Go to this website for further fun!
http://www.esquire.com/fiction/napkin-fiction/napkinproject
Currently listening to: Phil trying to explain benefits
Currently feeling: artistic