CRAIGSLIST: “Approx 90% of the people in the Western Hemisphere will want to know more about Mira, Mistress of Destiny”

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This is the start of an obsession, I think. My buddy Danny sent over this great ad from the “Writing Gigs” section of Portland’s Craigslist:

Mira, Mistress of Destiny

Reply to: the21writer@alumni.marymount.edu
Date: 2008-01-01, 3:05AM

I’ve written both a novel and a screenplay about a female Maya shaman who leads her people.
My search leads me to seek a media-contact person who can channel this product into an appropriate market. Approx 90% of the people in the Western Hemisphere will want to know more about Mira, Mistress of Destiny.

Skip the lazy, 50s B-movie title. (“Mistress of Destiny” sounds like a trashy fantasy novel landing just this side of pornography.) Skip “female Maya shaman” and the inevitable leopard-skin bikini, the sweat beading between perfect brown jungle tits. Skip the zanily optimistic “novel and a screenplay.” Skip the creepy “my search.” Skim right down to that last, key sentence which tells us “approx 90% of the people in the Western Hemisphere will want to know more about Mira, Mistress of Destiny.”

I mean, What? It’s a phrase so ungrounded in accepted reality as to make you think for a minute that everything you’ve ever known might have been exactly the opposite of how you knew it–the deranged thesis of some fucked up metaphysics. It just hangs way out there, so obviously begging to be attacked that it’s kind of suspicious. A little too easy, James Bond might say. For instance “90% of the Western Hemisphere” means that every single person in the Western Hemisphere who has the means to purchase Mira, Mistress of Destiny (or see the movie) will. Plus, substantial multi-national charity efforts will be need to be advanced to ensure that the poor in all countries–even those truly desperate poor with the flies on the face, the dirt floors and the threat of a lonely painful death all around–will read Mira, Mistress of Destiny. The U.N. will probably have to be enlisted to translate the book into 150,000 languages or whatever. Highly-trained Mira, Mistress of Destiny emergency response teams will need to be dispatched to indigenous peoples living in the deepest jungles and atop the highest peaks; copies of the book will have to be dropped from cargo planes onto remote Alaskan outposts; those homeless people that live in the subways underneath New York City will have to somehow be coaxed above ground and taught how to read, as well as be convinced that reading Mira, Mistress of Destiny would be a good use of their time. Our entire half of the world will come alive with movement and activity as furniture factories are switched over to churn out hundreds of thousands of copies of Mira, Mistress of Destiny, and governments halt their far-flung wars to divert the funds to making more books (finally!). There would, in short, have to be a New Mira, Mistress of Destiny World Order.

I of course Googled “Mira, mistress of destiny” after I read this. Mainly I wanted to know what kind of person cites “90% of the people of the Western Hemisphere” as the projected demographic for his “novel and screenplay,” then has second thoughts, begins to doubt his numbers, sees with a little shock what he has actually typed on the page and comes to the conclusion that adding “approximately” would be a good way to head off any potential criticism. The only thing I knew was that it had to be a man, because this was the twisted logic of a real dude.

The first thing I found out was that the dude had posted on a number of Craigslists. Each posting varied a bit, suggesting that he hadn’t simply cut-and-pasted the same ad. However each post carried that key bit of “Western Hemisphere” delusion. Orange County: “Approx. 90% of the people in the Western Hemisphere await ‘Mira, Mistress of Destiny’”; San Francisco: “Apporx. [sic] 90% of the people in this Western Hemisphere have an interest in this subject.”; Denver: “Approx 90% of the people in this Western Hemisphere will flock to see ‘Mira, Mistress of Destiny.’; New York: “Everyone in the Western Hemisphere is bound to flip ove ‘Mira, Mistress of Destiny.’” If nothing else, he was sure of his made up facts.

After tracking the dude through Craigslist, I finally found some identifying information. Actually, a surprising amount of identifying information in an equally surprising place: The comments section of an article titled “Penelope Cruz Crowned Hollywood’s New Style Queen” posted to www.aceshowbiz.com on December 14th, 2007. There was posted his address, 4317 N. 16th Street Arlington, VA 22207, a more detailed synopsis of Mira, Mistress of Destiny (“Think Kung Fu in Mesoamerica”), and his name: “Skeeze Whitlow”. This was posted by Skeeze (twice) on the 14th, perhaps after he finished learning about Penelope’s sexy, yet in the end romantic, couture.

Who is “Skeeze Whitlow”? According to his homepage, Whitlow sailed in the Merchant Marines, graduated from Marymount University and “believes life to be a good deal.” He is a writer of such stories as “Spaghetti Farm” (“Now, our spaghetti farm is as good as new. And we grow enough spaghetti to feed the world”) and “The Bong in the Binnacle” (“This here bong of his was nothing but a two foot length of cut fiberglass pipe with a smoking bowl attached, and a suction hole below the mouthpiece.”). Unfortunately there is no data on how these fared with what percentage of the Western Hemisphere.

But I keep coming back to that “90% of people…”  I can’t quite discredit this as fully as I’d like.  On some weird level it actually makes sense.  So I have a few questions for you, Skeeze Whitlow, if that is indeed your real name. Now I have your email address so I will ask you these questions. These questions deal mainly with the Eastern Hemisphere, with which you seem unfamiliar. They are mostly variations of this question: Don’t you think that the Eastern Hemisphere, once it becomes aware of the massive coordinated efforts to promote Mira, Mistress of Destiny underway in this half of the world, might also be interested in Mira, Mistress of Destiny? And don’t you think you will need someone comfortable in both hemispheres–equally adept at making pizzas in New York and in Italy while at the same time able to make Chinese pizzas in China? This is me. These are trans-hemispheric times, Skeeze, and they call for trans-hemispheric thinking. I think exactly in this way. The way I see it, if your “90% of people in the Western Hemisphere” numbers are anywhere near accurate, we can count on twice that many readers for Mira, Mistress of Destiny in the Eastern Hemisphere. I’ll take this on, Skeeze, and I won’t stop until every two-bit wallpaper factory in China is puking out paperbacks of Mira, Mistress of Destiny at a truly alarming rate. Hit me up: 802-683-9996.

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