Good morning, John.

A few years ago, I found a book in a trash can, and if that sounds weird to you, it's gonna get  way weirder than that. I do, like, look in every trash can I open.

I,   I've got kind of a thing for trash. Trash is, of course, often quite bad.  Uh, that's why it's in there,  but it's also just stuff  and it can be, like, anything. Most stuff is just gonna be where it's supposed to be.  Like, the cars are on the road, and the cigarettes are at the corner store, and the sandwiches  are at the sandwich shop, and the clothes are on the person.

But in the trash,  it could be anything. Like, one time, I found a whole purse in the trash with, like,  credit card and ID still in there. Somebody had clearly stolen it and taken the cash  and tossed it, and I got to  reunite it with its owner,  and I felt like a hero.

And  that was fantastic for me,  but kind of terrible for  Katherine, who does not like  that I have been rewarded for this behavior. So it’s not super weird that I was looking  into a trash can. It’s a little weird that I found a book in there, it’s not like it was the end of  a semester at a college campus, and you could find a bunch of old textbooks that you could then  resell on eBay over the summer and make some money, which is what I did in college,  and that might explain some of my obsession with trash.

So it wasn't weird that I  was looking in the trash.  It was a little weird that  there was a book in there,  but the book itself was extremely weird. I know this doesn't seem likely or possible,  but the book seemed to know who I was, and the book had instructions for me.  It wanted me to do things with it and to tell it things. And it said it needed me,  because it wanted to do something that it couldn't do without me, which was to  become human, which is, of course, impossible, and the book agreed that it was impossible,  but it still wanted to try anyway.

And so I ignored it, of course, because what  else do you do in a situation like that? But every once in a while, I would pick up  the book, and I would do one of the things that it told me to do. And as I did that,  two pretty weird things started to happen.

First, the book actually   did start to get a little bit more human. Like, not human, obviously, but, like,  the more time I spent with it, the more the object itself went from being, like,  definitely not a human to, like, if there's a way to get closer to human, it got closer.  You see what I'm saying? But second, I think I started to actually be  a bit more human.

The more time I spent with the book, the more its sincere appreciation  for humans made me appreciate being a human. Finally, I get to the last page and I turn it,  sort of excited to see how the book would end, as you generally are, but what’s there was  bizarre enough to be almost  a little bit upsetting. It said that I wasn't enough  and that it needed more  and that I could get it to more people, which,  I don't know, is like, super  true.

That's just, like,  an accurate statement about me. So I made a copy for my brother,  but after that, it still wanted more, so I made a dozen or so copies for some friends.  After that, it still wanted  more. So I feel like we need  to go a lot bigger, and so  we're doing a Kickstarter  to see how many we can make.

There are two versions. One is $14 so that we can  get it into as many hands as possible. But then there's also like a nicer, hardcover version  with nice paper that we're doing for $27.

And also, if you want to have it guaranteed  for shipping by Christmas, you could pay two extra dollars for that. But here's what I'll say: it's a good book. Like, I don't know how you're gonna feel,  but I was just, like, desperately grateful to have any opportunity to do, like, human things  with a book rather than inhuman things  with a screen for a little bit of time, at least.

So as much as the book appears to think  that I am doing favors for it, I think that it is doing favors for me. We have kept this  Kickstarter as simple and cheap as we can make it. I have no idea how this is going to go,  but hopefully you'll like it.

John, I'll see you tomorrow.