Dear Gifted Teen:
Picture, if you will, the heartbreakingly temporary canvas of a summer night. Each moment evaporates into the mist of memory as fast as it can be felt. The muggy scent of summer’s stillness is pierced only by the trivial phosphorescence of a mindless firefly. Dead stars linger on in the sky as a sick joke—absence itself masquerading as a panoply of permanence.
This is a typical summer evening for a gifted teen. The pleasures of youth are smothered in the mind’s crib by the much-praised pillow of your own awareness. Activities are to be mastered, friends are to be impressed, and life is to be learned, not lived.
Rest assured: there is an escape from what makes you special—and it begins right here.
Camp Fantastic is a place for teens to have sex, do drugs, and stay out of trouble.
Things you can do at Camp Fantastic include …
Read
Sex
Play games that you make up
Drink / Do drugs
Sleep in bunk beds
Go Fish
Go Fish (card game)
Comic books
War (card game only)
Conversation
Unstructured Free Time
Horseshoes (coming in 2016)
Friendships
Unforgettable memories
At this point, you may be a bit curious about the person writing you this letter. I am a former gifted teen myself. Years of neglect from loved ones about the peculiar challenges of my predicament—particularly with regard to maintaining the delicate and necessary self-restorative cycle of mindfulness and mindlessness that comes much more naturally to those whose inner cerebral acrobatics are not permanently set to emergency-high levels of attention-demand—led to a series of emotional breakdowns over the course of my life that have spangled my generally extraordinary intellect with the welcome-textured scars of impulsive thinking and counterproductive endeavors, as well as flash-bouts of radically unfiltered and unnecessary honesty, some of them on display in this very letter.
After many long and unprofitable years acquiring bottle cap collections and selling them for scrap metal (long story—it’s not quite as stupid as it sounds, but essentially the sentimental and historical interest affixed to the bottle caps forced me to buy them at a considerable premium over the value of the metal itself), I found myself facing a brutal foreclosure on my house in the Hamptons. In the ensuing panic, I founded Camp Fantastic, primarily as a tax dodge but also as a way of changing lives for the better.
Today, I am a former millionaire living in an air-conditioned apartment not far from the historic town of Patchogue, New York. Would I give it all up to change places with you, a gifted teen on the cusp of an unforgettable summer of priceless, idle pleasures? Of course not. Being a gifted teen is a walking, waking nightmare. But perhaps, with some time and effort, you can change places with me.
Remember, there is no adult supervision at Camp Fantastic, so be sure to keep an eye out for your own safety and best interests.
As a favor to me, please do not kill yourself at Camp Fantastic.
Have a fantastic time.
Pugel Karnopovich, Jr.
Founder, Camp Fantastic
There Is a Fine Line Between Why and Why Not
“There is a very fine line between why and why not,” said our graduation speaker.
And the secret of life was to live right on that line.
Or on the “why not?” side.
Or on the “why?” side, but you’re always looking over at “why not?” and wondering.
Something like that. None of us remembered. All of these made a lot of sense. Whatever it was, it was a great speech, and if we ever need to know it exactly, we can look it up.
The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women