To my sincere and caring friends selling me their crap:

I will soon be leaving. I am slowly disappearing. It is with deep regret, relief and an overall feeling of shame that I write this. This is not a suicide note, though, but rather a statement of intent with which I hope to inform you why I am leaving.

You courted me with lies for a long time, and it is only now that I realize it. I thought you loved me. You remembered my name (though always forgot how to pronounce it) and you always found out where I lived. You were punctual, and though you were kind of pushy, you always professed to have my best interest in mind.

I am no longer fooled, though. I am leaving every one of you.

I have joined too many of your CD and book clubs, have fallen prey to too many free issues of Sports Illustrated and switched long-distance phone service for the last time. I have paid off my credit card and have canceled it. One bulk mailing and telemarketing company at a time, my name is being erased.

It will be easy to give up some things, such as the little product registration surveys you get when you buy a new appliance. My credit card was easily disposed of as well, no longer tempting me with its instant gratification and delayed suffering. As far as magazines, who really reads Rolling Stone any more anyway?

The most difficult item to relinquish will be the Internet. For years I have been provided with semi-factual information, e-mail and, of course, free porn. I will need to relearn the inner workings of libraries and reference books.

I will miss the New York Times online, StrangeSearch, unlimited music downloads and everything else convenient and free. The amount to which I anticipate missing all of this suggests a dependency I am not even ready to explore.

What then, is the gain, you ask? I am not certain, really. I know that for the past 24 years I have been neatly tracked and itemized into various files with labels such as “white,” “total income $20-40,000 a year,” “married,” “student,” “likes baseball” and perhaps even “listens to Elvis Costello” and “likes naked women.” I don’t really know if these types of labels exist, but if the sometimes too-specific and eerily interesting bulk mailings and mass e-mails are any indication, I think they do.

I realize that this is a lifelong process. It is impossible to determine who has records on me. Can I truly disappear and still get mail? What about taxes and the health insurance I wish I had?

Arguing against new media such as the Internet is akin to seventeenth-century arguments against novels or the later proliferation of the radio and telephone, you will say. But please know, this is just something I have to do. It’s not you, it’s me.

Perhaps this is an inherited desire. I know too well that this sort of thing has been done before.

My own father, for example, left suddenly though quietly when I was 12 and has been unreachable ever since. The sole record of his existence since then has been bills forwarded to me, his unfortunate namesake. So I have already been forced to shed one existence. This knowledge of the inner workings of credit agencies and banks will come in handy during the coming years.

From here the future is uncertain. I will finish school and hopefully slip from the university’s records. Whether or not I will forever be in the sights of the ISU Foundation as a rich and possibly philanthropic alumnus is unknown.

Perhaps I will slip quietly and easily from everyone’s radar. Perhaps I will lose touch with what is real and practical. Perhaps I will end up in the desert discussing morality.

Perhaps I will fail.

The most important thing for me to realize is the selfishness and impracticality of this all, just to keep everything else in perspective, right?

I will, from time to time, let you know how I am doing. To cut you out completely seems unfair. You will probably always know where I am. If there is an emergency, please contact my assistant (really my wife, Anne). From time to time I may even update you on how I am doing.

Goodbye, Hotmail and freexxxpicshotladies.com. Adieu BankCard services with your 0.9% interest for the first six months with a pre-approved $10,000 credit limit. So long, 12 free CDs for the price of one. From here on out, you are dead to me.

I will have my computer, and though you may argue that it is paradoxical and hypocritical of me to retain any remnant of a technology I now despise, I will still use it to write and play solitaire.

One more thing. Please remove me from your list.

Sincerely,

P. L. O’Bryan

Patrick O’Bryan is a senior in English from Indianola.