Dear Mr. [redacted],

I need to apologise for the email sent yesterday from this address. It was over-familiar, and it sorely lacked the buoyant enthusiasm and effervescent hyperbole appropriate to a message that was, essentially, fan mail.

In my defence it was composed by my cat.

(I don’t know if you know any cats, but trust me when I tell you they are all assholes with no boundaries and surprising manual dexterity.)

It transpires that idly watching hours of stand-up comedy on Netflix can induce a peculiar state of altered consciousness. One finds oneself thinking, “Could I, too, perchance be humorous?” One’s speech patterns slip into the cadence of a raconteur. In humans, this is considered a delusion of grandeur; in cats, grandeur is the baseline state. And so my cat, thus affected, hacked my email account to write and send the world’s most awkward fan mail under the misapprehension he was being witty.

No big deal, you might say. (Might you? That question is currently a matter of some debate within these four walls.) Anyway, if you might have said that, I would have agreed — right up until the mortifying moment I discovered my cat had signed off not with his own name, but with mine.

I write to you now, firstly to apologise for negligently leaving my computer unattended and allowing this unfortunate situation to occur, and secondly, to set the record straight: in the astronomically unlikely event that, either in written or spoken form, you should be inclined to employ your impressive comedic talent to muse on my cat’s graceless missive, please be sure to attribute it correctly, as he did not.

His name is Professor Zebulon.


Yours in earnest,
[name redacted]

P.S. Love your work.