Thank you for your Interest in our Group of Friends

This is to inform you that you have not been admitted into our close circle of friends, known informally as “the gang.”

We appreciate your application, which was thorough and engaging. Your personal essay was a fine construction. We especially liked your emphasis on gender, and the fact that you mentioned our “gang” has yet to admit a woman to full member status, after many years of existence.

Your gender was not a factor in our decision.

We did not feel that having a female member was in any way problematic. We especially feel that your potty mouth, which might be considered unusual for a female, made us feel comfortable with the sophisticatedly profane banter that so often takes place during our gatherings, especially after the scotch is poured and the cigars come out.

We like that you smoked cigars, too. In fact, everybody in the gang felt that both probationary meetings with you were a complete delight.

While so many years of history have created our friendship as a kind of impenetrable text that can only be understood by the characters in the text themselves, you seemed to pick up quickly on the various nicknames, porn predilections, lies, aphorisms and absurd exploits of the group members and held your own quite well against our barrage of wit, intellectualism and buffoonery.

Unfortunately, some of us felt that you did not possess the heightened sense of irony that is so important to membership of our enclave.

There were several occasions where it seemed to us that you took us seriously, when we were being ironic.

Although one member (myself) suggested that you might have been expressing faux seriousness in a highly ironic gambit of your own, in the end this explanation was dismissed.

It’s not that we are so sarcastic that we are incapable of emotion. As you witnessed yourself, several of our members weep after their fourteenth or fifteenth Scotch, and become unbearably sentimental.

But even during this weeping, the rest of us maintain our insouciance, as we know he will be embarrassed about the outburst in the morning.

You, on the other hand, embraced the weeping drunkard and assured him that he would be OK.

He won’t be OK.

None of us will be OK.

And that, in the end, is perhaps the real reason we chose not to admit you. You have a wonderful life ahead of you. Why on earth would you want to be a member of this insane posse?

You are welcome to appeal this decision. In person, if you like. We will tonight, in fact, be performing a bar crawl down King Street starting at a wonderful little spot called Felix Cocktail.

Why don’t you meet us there at 8?

(Of course you realized, quite early in this “rejection letter”, that we were only joking.

You did, right?)