Worst Email Ever

My friend Michael Malice has a new site that has a lot of potential for fun, Worst Email Ever: The Internet's Inbox. I made tonight's cut because of an email in which I told him that when I saw the news story about wrestler Chris Benoit murdering his family, I immediately thought of him. (Michael Malice just saw a collaboration of his published, an autobiography of pro wrestler Matt Hughes, so it wasn't an entirely random thing to say.) Michael is responsible for the description-defying Overheard in New York, after all. And how many people make this kind of impression on someone like Harvey Pekar?)

I met Michael about a year ago, when we both spoke at a panel on published bloggers in New York. The first thing he did was give me a gift for Schuyler. The next night, he found me at a book party we were both attending and hung with me for the rest of the night. If he ever felt his style cramped by the tag-along yokel, he never let on, and my impression of Michael is that he doesn't do much in this world that he doesn't want to do. That was refreshing, as was his attitude (similar to mine) towards using politically correct language where disability is concerned. I think we shocked a few people standing around us, and I couldn't be happier.

My impression of Michael Malice is not that he's some kind of terrifying narcissist, but rather that he has the ability to size up a person almost immediately and know what he needs to know about them almost instinctually. That clearly doesn't bod well for a lot of the people he meets. For me, it worked out pretty well, I think.