(1) Note to the Reader [Colin] — American Ontology

Note to the Reader
Colin Beveridge
Hamlin County, SD

After my brother called me for the umpteenth time with doubts surrounding his literary vocation and we talked and talked and talked—this must have amounted to a hundred hours over the course of the last decade—I finally let go of my long-held hope that he might do something different. Not to quit writing, but to do a psychological operation on himself such that he wouldn’t need me in my predetermined absence in the future. Eventually he did come around to the reality that there just isn’t much room for his kind, or if there is room, there’s virtually no pie. These were the major conditions that brought American Ontology out of our phone calls and into its interstitial being between mega data storage sites and your screen.

But that’s not what he asked me to write about. He wanted me to do something akin to a kind of… what? Not CliffsNotes, but another kind of ten thousand foot view that could provide the distance, which he said he didn’t know how to communicate, between the person of the editor and the writing he chose to publish—pretty standard stuff I would guess. I think a big part of it was his dissatisfaction with the level of perfection he achieved in the launch, and I’ll take some credit because at a tense moment on the phone I told him to solve the problem by addition instead of subtraction. Hence the note…

And I love him, but as I told him the other day, whenever I describe him to a third party the line is: He’s the dumbest smart guy I know. Meaning, I think he’s being a bit dickish in this case, and while I’m happy to give an introduction, I am by no means going to cosign on his pretention, not least of all because I firmly believe in each of these pieces and the concept as a whole. Either way, it’s too late to look back, and neither of us have had difficulty in the past with that specific brand of acceptance.

Presidents’ Day 2026

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