October 1st, 2024
Dear Mr. Fudd,
I read your “Strange Letter,” how is Pepsi nowadays? It’s been a while since I’ve seen him, but we never really got along, at least not since the Ferris wheel incident. It’s funny how something so trivial can leave such a big impact on a relationship.
I was excited to get your letter, but I had a false alarm earlier in the week. I received a handwritten letter in perfect cursive and eagerly tore open the long form horizontal envelope expecting a correspondence from yourself. Instead, it was a letter handwritten by Walter Graves inviting me to attend a Jehovah’s Witness Bible study. He didn’t give me any details on said Bible study, but encouraged me to visit the Jehovah’s Witness website for further details. I elected not to, but I get the sense that Mr. Graves may feel the need for a friend, his address is below if you care to provide him one:
Walter Graves
14811 Paul Plaza
Omaha, NE 68154
Send Pepsi my best, and tell him I’m sorry. Maybe that’ll get the bastard to admit he was wrong.
Much obliged,
C.S. Beaty
•••
Haywood Fudd is a pen name, but to the recipients of his letters the nature of his quest is a mystery. Since I had the benefit of Mike the Printer, I knew the author of my letter was an actual person. Others weren’t so lucky.
The only internet record of Fudd is a Reddit thread titled “r/ARG-Strange Letter” started by someone who received a message from Haywood mailed to his home. In his letter, Fudd described how his friend nicknamed “Pepsi” called him “to ask how long I thought it would take to roast a hot-dog by holding it right above bubbling, snarling, red hot lava.” He told Pepsi, “depending on the breaks, two minutes plus or minus.”
I know little of Reddit. And I knew nothing about the letters “ARG.” But thanks to my buddy Mike the Printer, I did have some secret knowledge that made all of the Haywood Fudd internet conspiracy theories I had just gained access to ohh so much fun.
“I got a weird letter in the mail about a month ago addressed to me in my current address. Thought it might be an ARG, but it’s personally addressed to me and hand signed in sharpie. Any thoughts?”1
-Kmart 29
And let the games begin.
An ARG is an “alternate reality game.” If you’ve never heard of those then you probably had a girlfriend in high school. According to my own internet research, an ARG is an elaborate stunt that blends the digital and physical world and never admits to being a game. It consists of a series of esoteric puzzles that can only be solved by utilizing the full power of Mountain Dew-fueled online message boards. An ARG may look something like: noticing there are certain letters on the back of a Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt that are mysteriously capitalized, entering those letters into a web browser, placing the results into a program that measures the frequency of a sound wave, putting those results into a program that generates a given dial tone, corresponding the dial tone to a series of GPS coordinates that locate every pay phone in North America, sending a representative to each of those pay phones at an appointed time determined by a string of code buried within the inner flap of a milk carton, and then answering the payphones when they ring in order to learn how to unlock an Easter egg in the Halo 4 video game.
And after Kmart 29 got his letter from Haywood Fudd, something like this seemed more likely to him than just a guy writing a letter because he thought it was funny.
Man the internet is great.
“What a bizarre letter. I want to say it is some sort of strange ARG, but it could easily be the ramblings of some random guy. I couldn’t find much searching the name Haywood Fudd online, besides a YouTube channel with literally nothing on it and an inquiry about how much a pack of unopened Evel Knievel beer is worth… If it is an ARG, your best bet might be to try and figure out what PBS show about volcanoes aired around December 31st 2022, since the letter was apparently typed up on New Year’s Day of this year, and Mr. Fudd claimed he watched a show about volcanoes ‘last night.’ Perhaps that volcano show has some sort of clue?”2
Kmart 29 said he would give that a shot.
Lacking the temerity to mount a full blown alternative reality quest of my own, I instead waited patiently for the mail to arrive.
•••
October 4th, 2024
Dear Mr. Beaty,
Thank you for your dispatch dated October 1. October 1 is one of my top five days in the Julian calendar.
Regarding your request that I scribble a letter to the Jehovah’s Witness, one Mr. Graves, I propose you address this matter in your own outré literary modus operandi. I’m currently stitched up and conducting another world record literary stunt and have no time to spend tweaking a bedeviled Jehovah’s Witness.
Thank you for the bookmark. I will, as is my wont, put it through the paces.
Know this: Gillespie’s hobby is wrestling empty pizza boxes. When Gillespie and his Mrs. are through eating the pizza, Gillespie drags the empty, greasy pizza box out of his front yard and goes full on berserk on it. It’s a sight to behold.
One of Gillespie’s favorite wrestling moves is to stand on the railing of his front stoop, leap high into the air, and to come down on top of the empty pizza box with a giant elbow smash. Another Gillespie’s favorite moves is putting an empty pizza box in between his legs and strangling and squeezing the pizza box until it’s flatter than a German potato pancake. When he’s really amped up, Gillespie takes a metal folding chair and proceeds to beat the empty pizza box to cardboard pulp.
I inquired why Gillespie wrestles empty boxes. “It’s nuanced. Used pizza boxes and I have a history,” he testified in response.
Gillespie wrestled with 714 pizza boxes over the past 17 years, his record being 712- 2. I attempted to interrogate him about his two losses. “I don’t want to talk about it. It bamboozles me why people are interested in knowing how I lost to two pizza boxes instead of asking about my 712 wins,” tooted an aggrieved Gillespie.
Gillespie’s bowling average is 178. His bowling average goal for 2025: 210.
Much obliged,
Haywood Fudd
King of the Literary Daredevils
https://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/1100nfg/strange_letter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/1100nfg/strange_letter/
