Dear Mr. Pinkwater,
Sometime before November, 1997 when their article was published, my parents Joanne Yeck and Tom McGreevey interviewed you for an article in senior magazine titled “Prolific Writer Well-Kept Secret”. Your face and hand which adorns the cover of 5 Novels appears there above an ad for a full-care Alzheimer’s home. They had corresponded with you briefly before you agreed to do the interview, I recall (I was eight at the time) and after a visit to Roswell, NM, we sent you a box of UFO cookies that I conjectured resembled the lacertilian vittles in Lizard Music. You sent your thanks along with a lovely drawing of yourself eating said cookies in, I believe, a vampire cape.
I have probably read Borgel at least a dozen times. It is easy to lose count when you persuade your father to record himself reading the book aloud, stick it in your red walkman and press rewind as many times as magnetic tape can bear. In addition to believing that it contains the essential tenants of most major world religions, I have always dreamed of road tripping as close to the fraying fringes of time-space as is possible for most of us.
I am closer than most people in that I am registered to drive in an event called the Mongol Rally, in which teams in cars with 1200 cc engines drive, roll, hobble, and are pushed from the starting point in London, to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and are encouraged to do it in the most lackadaisical way possible (more information here www.theadventurists.com/the-adventures/mongol-rally). This is done both because it is awesome, and because doing improbable things is a good way to raise money for charity. The Adventurists who run the Rally have overseen the collection of almost 6 million dollars for charity in the past 8 years. From now on they officially promote Cool Earth, a charity which is taking remarkable real-time action against the deforestation of the rain forest (www.coolearth.org/). I had no idea before they announced their partnership this year what a devastating effect rainforest destruction has on the climate, and will likely continue to make it a personal cause in the future, so to that extent, their plan is working.
My teammates, one Jessica Datko, co-conspirator of middle-school vintage, and James Dyson, burly kilt-wearer and lifter of heavy objects, and I and all young-y, student-y types, and are thus rigorously trying to avoid paying for the entire trip ourselves, because that would actually be impossible. We also have to raise a minimum of 1000 pounds in money that goes directly to Cool Earth. Money that helps us buy a car and fuel it also kind of goes to charity too, because the car gets auctioned to some lucky Mongol in Mongolia, and that money goes to Cool Earth as well. It also helps us be the biggest badasses we know, which is no small thing. So far we’ve had individual contributions from friends and family towards our trip fund, and are now ready to start accepting charity donations. Corporate sponsorship is allowed, and we mean to get it. But we don’t have great visibility outside of people we know personally (mostly via our page on Facebook) and who doubtless now all feel harassed by us. Having the word about us (and the Mongol Rally and Cool Earth in general, it’s a shame how few people know about them) spread further would be an immense help to us. There is a video made by me on our crowd funding campaign page, and much more information about how all these rallying shenanigans work here (www.indiegogo.com/onesmallsteppe/). We’d be extremely grateful if you just talked us up and made us seem like a proverbial “big deal” (only one of us is actually very big), but our shirts do come in all sizes.
Sincerely yours,
Zan McGreevey
Why do I find out about cool things like this when I am old and feeble and could not possibly participate? I could possibly say, ""I cannot myself hope to go along on this nifty adventure, but at least I can contribute and help others do so,"" but, no. However I am bcc'ing this to someone in media, who may or may not find it interesting. I wish you great success in your undertaking, wish it were me, or at least that I was a Mongol falling about laughing at you.
