Hello, and welcome to the wonderful world of Mickey Foley! You’re poised on the brink of a grand adventure. Count yourself lucky that you have the privilege of diving into my oeuvre. I can only imagine the boundless joy overflowing the banks of your soul as you embark on this quest! I hope it offers you, at the very least, a tiny fraction of the bliss I felt while I was being astounded by each brilliant, new idea as it burst into my brain. Prepare to be amazed!
It’s a good thing I started documenting my life and work at the tender age of five. You may wonder how I could’ve known from such an early age that, someday, the world would need the gift of my insight. I wish I could answer such an astute question, but, alas, not even my powers of perception are strong enough to plumb the depths of my own genius. Such is the tragedy of the outrageously gifted.
I’ve tried to make it easier for you to trace my intellectual journey. I didn’t want to lead future historians on a wild goose chase through boxes of randomly scattered notebooks, journals and Trapper Keepers. Therefore, I’ve organized and annotated my papers with meticulous precision. My autobiography fills more than a thousand pages, and there are hundreds of hours of interviews recorded for my self-produced autobiographical documentary. The truly dedicated Mickey Foley-philes will be relieved to know that I’ve preserved every second of those interviews on DVD’s, VHS, Betamax and Super 8 film. It took much self-restraint to keep the film’s running time under 6 hours, but I think the results speak for themselves.
While watching the interviews with my family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, critics, rivals, blood enemies and casual acquaintances, you’ll doubtless notice their confusion and incredulity that I went to such lengths to document my journey. It may be hard to understand how they remained oblivious to my brilliance, but this was commonplace. My genius was not fully appreciated in my own time; I would even go so far as to say it was criminally neglected. Indeed, in some quarters I was vilified for flouting the prevailing conventions of thought.
But don’t be too hard on my contemporaries in your analysis. They were blinded by the myopia, greed and ignorance of our historical period. It was my sad fate to be decades, centuries or perhaps millennia ahead of my time. Thank your lucky stars or whatever higher power you believe in (if such superstitions as religion are still practiced in your day) that you didn’t live during my era. It was a dark age utterly bereft of redeeming qualities.
You’ve surely noted how my areas of expertise are not limited to history, literature, theater and comedy. No doubt my thoughts on politics, science, philosophy, psychology, sociology and Dr. Who exegesis have led to earth-shattering breakthroughs in those fields. I imagine by now whole university departments have been set aside for the study of my work, given its Shakespearean scope, encompassing the whole of human experience and imagination. There is no nook or cranny of humanity I haven’t examined through the microscope of my own peerless perception.
Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if my work had inspired the establishment of a top-flight institution of higher learning devoted completely to the study of my papers, given the endless breadth and bottomless depth of my knowledge. I can only imagine what fanciful name you’ve given to this field of study. “Mickey Foley Studies” or “Mickey Foley-ology,” perhaps. Don’t feel as if you need to limit yourself to those options. They’re merely suggestions. You can probably come up with something better. I’m afraid my infinite gift of invention is failing me at the moment.
Now I bid you adieu from the Great Beyond with my signature signoff, anticipation of which has surely kept you on tenterhooks for the duration of this preface. And so, without further ado: toodle-oo.
(Editor’s Note: This piece originally came with copious footnotes, but they were lost in a fire at the U-Haul facility where they were being stored.)
No comments:
Post a Comment