Bubble Wrap Prank Emails by Chris Molnar

December 20, 2020. Well, today happens to be Chris’s birthday. He sent this to me with the description: “prank e-mails i sent to powerhouse's listing for free bubblewrap once to mess with a co-worker!”

#1

hello i have a special interest in sealed air and your offer is very intriguing. please tell me the contents of this bag and a good time for to come by and perhaps feel inside and look at what I can touch

#2

are bubbles big or small I do like both ways but prefer large this has good feel when I press down

#3

from this picture it does look to me that there are papers and other items can I leave this with you

maybe I pay you money to do this perhaps four

#4

yesterday I arrived at your closing time of 7 and waited for one half an hour but I did not see any worker although I did see this bag of material and did look at it through glass and these used bubbles do tempt so

#5

I do not understand why you told me this bag was already gone it is there. it is cruel and I will pay you perhaps eight dollars although your list does say free and I will return.  please tell me bubble wrap books thank you

#6

i did take the train two hours to the copy center where they do let me buy new wrap it is not so used as yours too firm to touch and cold factory. please I do not know why you do not let me take your wrap, I saw it was gone in the shop, you do not write.  it is soft at my house and I think you could enjoy the good feel but when I come in they told me I cannot ask for you. there is a tree with bubble wrap on the top leaves and that is where I live, please come

Western Impressions by Chris Molnar (@stationsofthecrass).

[[[Naomi’s note, Thursday, June 28, 2022. Chris Molnar wrote “Western Impressions” in 2014, after moving from Manhattan to Las Vegas to open The Writer’s Block, the very first independent bookstore in the city’s history. This piece of writing is an homage to a place where icons stand tall and where, as he writes, “cosmic emptiness… sets it apart even from the great metropolises.” Molnar is one of the best writers I have ever encountered, and “Western Impressions” speaks to the welling shades of melancholy and deep gold that whisper throughout his body of work.]]]

What they don't tell you is that what happens outside Vegas stays outside Vegas. You can form the words but they drip off your tongue like so much condensation. Only the people of Las Vegas know the true meaning of news and trends, which is nothing. The only truth in this world is the sun, the water trickling from far-off streams. Serious, eternal pleasure; earned and won.

In Vegas there are streets folding off into haze under lazy, blinking lights. Friends and tourists wander in eccentric circles beneath mountains and starry slopes. Slurry rocks in the valley and dry windy pines above. Prostitutes and methheads abandon one precinct for another and the rich scent of history and absence fills the lungs, musty and strong and decayed.

The warm air creates an unbridgeable space between car and car, between lone figures laughing and lone figures quietly walking off into the distance. Every lone figure is inheritor to a tradition of mercenaries and scouts; shadows on horseback.

All of them stand behind an abandoned motel, shoes dusty in gravel and dirt, plotting and smoking, drinking and preparing. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Every revelation is a secret on a cosmic scale, and Vegas is nothing if not cosmic.

Like anywhere worth living, it's a desperate place to escape and a relief to finally find. The sort of safe harbor that lets the outcast live with a chance to succeed or die with some dignity in a place with a supreme tradition of rock bottom. It exists far above its size, a world alone like New York or Mexico City.

Yet no one knows. The divide between what happens in Vegas and what happens outside is complete. There is cosmic emptiness, there is an ineffable distance and absence, that sets it apart even from the great metropolises. Stretches of such silence that still reverberate with strangeness and humanity. The photo negative of the great sprawling cities, where the action is in the overwhelming quiet.

The lone figures gather, muttering in that space behind the abandoned motel, drinking in the empty lot. I feel safe, says a lone figure, because everything is desirable here. Ugliness and beauty, death and power.  Decay and development. Only here is there room and the precedent, infinite prerogative and need. The requirement of lost youth. The sun sets behind the lone figures and they go their lone ways. All that's left is the wind chattering voices through cranes and rubble.