CWLFT is the brainchild of nineteen year old Ryan Dylan Ryan and his eighteen year old sister Brionna Jennee Ryan. Beginning in 2008 as a Christian indie folk duo influenced by Devendra Banhart and Loggins & Messina, in just three short years their sound has matured, mixing elements of the Arcade Fire’s post-ironic dreariness and the lush electro sounds of El DeBarge with the neo-folk of Mumford & Sons and the undefinable quintessence of Fleet Foxes, whose name inspired one of the words in CWLFT’s own name.

“We started out doing worship music,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, who refuses to do any press unless his name is printed in full every time it’s mentioned, “but after a while I realized that I had my own, like, musical path to follow. Plus people kept calling me ‘Jesus queer’ and punching me in the kidney every time we did a show at the roller rink.”

After purchasing a 1989-vintage Roland CR-69 drum machine from a neighbor with special needs who had previously used the device to communicate with his elderly parents, Ryan Dylan Ryan recruited his sister Brionna Jennee Ryan on hurdy-gurdy, tenor banjo and backup vocals. “I’m not really sure what Brionna was doing musically before that,” Ryan Dylan Ryan says. “I know she sucked a guy’s dick behind the rec center this one time so she could afford to drive to Dallas and see Someone Loves You Boris Yeltsen, so I guess you could say she’s always had this musical obsession.”

Brionna Jennee Ryan (who credits her unique fashion sense to her incipient fetal alcohol syndrome) prefers to avoid the limelight — and, in fact, according to her brother, light altogether. “Yeah, she was born with this weird allergy to light,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “so she never comes out unless we’re playing a gig. I don’t actually even, like, know where she lives or anything. We rehearse in this old abandoned nuclear missile silo that these organic farmers are turning into a massive grow station, but we have to turn off the UV lights or Brionna will start projectile vomiting and stuff.” Ryan Dylan Ryan credits his sister’s delicate, sunny pop-perfect arrangements to the fact that she was born without a lower brain stem or tongue. “She’s so real, you know? She doesn’t like worry about all the bullshit like other people. She just sits in the dark with her hurdy-gurdy and her Brian Wilson records and just, like, makes art and stuff. And hoots.”

Despite being courted by Williamsburg indie darling label Swollen Coke Fork Records, Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too refuses to leave Muenster. “We’ve got our roots here,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “In Brionna’s case, that’s totally literal, by the way.” They chose to release their first album, I Heard Somebody Crying And Then I Realized It Was Me, through Internet channels only, though a limited edition — carved into an Edison wax cylinder and wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf — is available via mail order and through a special distribution deal with the Luby’s chain of affordable cafeterias, a move that Ryan Dylan Ryan describes as “thinking outside the Old Media box”.

The album — co-produced, like every other fucking indie rock album ever, by Steve Albini and Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo — is a curious mix of tender, heartfelt white people singing, reminiscent of Portland’s You Don’t Bring Your Mother and Bright Eyes, and dissonant electronica that one reviewer notoriously described as “sounding like Aphex Twin taking a violent shit at a truckstop in El Paso”.

“We slept in Albini’s studio while we were making the record,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “Only he didn’t know about it. He’s so funny — he’d walk around going ‘Why does my vocal booth smell like a sheep shit in it?’ and ‘Why doesn’t that albino whore have an indented nasal bridge like a normal human?’”

Critical success has come quickly for Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too, as well as a certain amount of underground fame. Ryan Dylan Ryan won’t discuss rumors that he’s currently in a relationship with Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, but statistics and the law of averages suggests that he probably is. Meanwhile, Brionna Jennee Ryan has been seen doing high profile DJ gigs at vegan collectives in northern Sweden during the long, sunless winter months, and is recording a collaboration with Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray to be entitled either Ah, Fuck, The Goddamn Weasels Are Tearing At Our Clits Again or simply Eeeeeeeaaaaauuuugh, which reportedly uses no instruments other than the sounds of Andersson and Ryan banging their skulls against moss-covered Icelandic cliff faces and weeping. “I’ve heard it,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “and it’s a totally challenging record. But it’s like, totally sunny and pop-perfect and danceable too.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream world keeps calling too. Recently director Noah Baumbach used the CWLFT song “Thundercats Ho” in his indie drama Melvin, His Trust Fund And His Bicycle, which also features tracks from Cut Fleet Cold Furnaces, You Don’t Bring Your Mother, Hey Look It’s Lisa Bonet From The Cosby Show and Beck. Another track from I Heard Somebody Crying And Then I Realized It Was Me was used in a television ad for Same Ol’ Hootenanny Moustache Wax. “I mean, I guess it probably looks like we’re selling out,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “but it’s hard to live without money. Plus somebody, I’m not gonna say who, but somebody in the band needed a tail removal operation, and they don’t do that for free in Texas.”

So what’s next for Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too? Ryan Dylan Ryan says the band’s just taking it easy and preparing to go into the studio to record their sophomore album, tentatively titled Fuck I Wish It Was 1988, which is rumored to be produced by the Arcade Fire’s Win Butler. “I called Win up one day,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan, “and asked him if he’d produce the album, and he said he would if he could fly down to Muenster and give me a Brazilian. I started laughing, but he was totally serious. I mean, dude, what would you do? It’s totally the guy from Arcade Fire? So he flew down and we went out in a cornfield and he gave me a wax. His wife filmed it with an 8mm film camera, but I haven’t seen it on, like, their website or anything yet, so maybe when they do a DVD or something.” The album is apparently a radical departure from the band’s current sound, featuring sunny, pop-perfect vocals over rootsy alt-country rather than shimmery alt-folk. “We’ve got one track, which I think is going to be called ‘Trapper Keeper Yay You’re So Rad’, and we’ve got like seven hundred and thirty vocal harmony tracks,” says Ryan Dylan Ryan. “Most of them are by Grizzly Bear, but I got my neighbor who sold me this drum machine one time to sing some of them, except he couldn’t remember the lyrics, so he just sang about Huey Long and the fascist takeover of Louisiana, but it’s like way more organic that way, you know?”

One thing’s for sure: Crystal Wolf Loves Foxes Too is the band to watch out for, for at least the next seven or eight minutes.

I don’t want to make a “pop” record, except in the most broad sense. I am bored with pop music. I’m bored with shiny, happy, sun-kissed music, with Brian Wilson fetishism, with ELO close harmonies and layers of major key Mellotron. I’m bored with beardo indie pop. I’m bored with Prozac music, blissed out “happy” music that actually has no passion behind it. I’m sick of danceability, of 8-bit synths, of the almost hysterical infantilism of most modern rock and roll.

I grew up in the 1980s. I love much of the music of the 1980s. I have absolutely no fucking desire whatsoever to attempt to replicate it as closely as possible, down to spending thousands of dollars buying really shitty “vintage” digital synthesizers that are easily and precisely replicable on any device with more complexity than a ten year old Nokia candybar cell phone. (Trust me on this; you can exactly replicate a TR-808 drum machine or Yamaha DX-7 synth in software now. There’s no magic in them, no secret ingredients, not even the random variation of a 1970s analog synth.)

I want to make music for unhappy people. I want to make music for sexually frustrated people. I want to make music for losers, geeks, freaks, drunks, addicts, burnouts. I want to make music that people will sit in the dark and listen to and burn incense and smoke cigarettes, and I want the music I make to maybe stop them from hurting quite so much. I want to make rough music. I want to make glitchy music. I want to mix the sounds of electronic music, which I love, with the emotional intensity of rock and roll. I want to make music for adults with adult emotions, ambiguous and not always beautiful. I want to make music that drones, that has beats, that makes you want to go out and fuck or kill or die or live. I want to make music that pretty people hear and get aneurysms and fall down dead on the street. I don’t want to be experimental, because making atonal horrible noise isn’t experimental. A lot of people already tried the experiments and produced a lot of pompous, shitty records.

I want to make a record, not a collection of singles for YouTube. I want to make videos, but I want them to be interesting, otherwise there’s no point.

Fuck Brian Wilson. Fuck Jeff Lynne. Fuck the Arcade Fire. My music is influenced by: William Gibson, Lorca, Clive Barker, T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Tricky, Garth Ennis, Hunter Thompson, Neil Gaiman, Van Morrison, The National, Grant Morrison, China Mieville, Dave McKean, Nick Drake, Sant’Elia, Bowie, Harlan Ellison, Nick Cave, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen. My music is influenced by all the horrible nights I spent drunk hurting myself and all the terrible things I’ve done and all the redemption I’ve managed to scrape together. My music is influenced by every pack of cigarettes I’ve smoked and every tab of acid I’ve chewed on and all the good sex and bad sex I’ve had and every shit bar I’ve ever been in and every beautiful salon and not at all by wonderful white suburbia. I don’t give a fuck about the lives of suburbanites unless they go mad.

I can’t sing. I don’t care anymore. I sing the way I sing. I write better songs than people who sing better than I do. My music isn’t complex. It doesn’t have the kind of chord changes that other musicians get excited by. I don’t care. I’ll write songs with two notes.

Lyrics matter. If you don’t think so, you’re doing it wrong.

I want to write songs that make people want to sell everything they own and get on a plane and disappear into the world, born again under wilder skies. I want people to fuck to my music. I want people to want my songs played on a boombox at their graveside. I want to make people happy. I want to make people think

I don’t need to rock harder than anybody else. I’m a pussy. I write gloomy mid-tempo music. That’s fine. I make gloomy mid-tempo music as hard as I fucking can. It’s not made to drop in the club to help morons find other morons to fuck. I want smart people fucking to my music.

I don’t care if anyone else likes my music anymore, or buys it. If you don’t like it, it’s not for you. Maybe in a hundred years, somebody will dig it. Maybe you dig it now. If you do, I’m glad. Really glad.

I will never be on the cover of a glossy magazine. Prom queens will never want to meet me because my music speaks to them. Nobody will ever ask me to do a celebrity remix. Nobody will ever put my music over the closing credits of a blockbuster movie. That’s fine. I don’t care.

Every song I record, every record I make, is a paper boat with a candle in it, set onto a wine-dark sea and sent off into the world. I don’t know where they will end up. I hope interesting and crazy and maybe useful places. But it doesn’t matter, in the end. All that matters is that I make them and set them free, until the day I die.

Anything else would be pathetic.

So I thought I’d share with you the tools and apps I’ve found coolest and most useful so far.

1) A keyboard Several years ago, I described in my Las Vegas CityLife column what I thought was the ideal form-factor for a portable computing device: a touch-enabled tablet that could be carried separately from its keyboard. The iPad gets this half-right, and honestly for most casual use the onscreen keyboard is fine. I can average about fifty WPM on it, which is decent for web browsing, tweeting, writing notes, etc.

However, I want to use my iPad to write long documents (like fiction) and PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript code. And for that, you need a physical keyboard. It’s not just the tactility of it, though that’s a big part of things; it’s also the fact that the iPad’s virtual keyboard takes up 50% of the screen, and when you’re trying to do serious coding or writing that doesn’t work.

I wanted the Apple bluetooth wireless keyboard, but I didn’t want to spend $70 for it. So I got Apple’s Camera Connection Kit, which includes a USB-iDevice 30 pin adapter. It’s made to stick USB drives into the iPad so you can transfer images onto it, but an undocumented feature is that you can hook other sorts of USB devices in as well…including both QWERTY keyboards and MIDI controllers.

I got a $14 mini-keyboard at Fry’s to go with it, one of the cheap little ones that sysadmins often buy to hook into servers they rarely need to directly access. It’s not bad — it has a steel frame and it’s barely wider than the iPad itself. Keyboard goes into the camera kit, camera kit goes into the iPad. The OS will popup and tell you the device isn’t supported, but it works perfectly well. Supposedly you can control the iPad’s hardware like volume and the Home button with keyboard combinations, but I haven’t figured them out yet.

I’m using it now to type this, and it’s just as responsive as my desktop, typing within the Safari browser. Selecting with the keyboard works perfectly — hold down the Shift key and use the arrows, just like a desktop — though often tabbing around interface stuff doesn’t work the way one would expect. But it’s a marked improvement.

2) Docs-To-Go This was my office suite of choice for the iPad, because it supports uploading docs to Google Docs and to Dropbox, which I use extensively. So far it’s pretty decent — almost fullscreen editing of Word documents. I can’t figure out if there are keyboard shortcuts for text formatting, but I haven’t tried much other than Ctrl-I for italics. I’m thinking of trying out WriteRoom as well, as I have it and love it on the desktop.

3) FTP On The Go / Textastic For code editing, this is my one-two combo. FTP On The Go is a really full-featured FTP client for iOS that also allows text editing of documents directly from the server. The only reason I use Textastic with it is that FTPOTG doesn’t support the only two code editing functions I really need: line numbering and syntax highlighting. Textastic does, though it doesn’t have its own FTP client built in. I’m hoping one of these two apps adopts the other one’s features so I can just use one, but for right now these are a nice set of tools. I also have iSSH for telnetting or SSHing into servers.

4) Reeder I’m a Google Reader junkie. Unfortunately, the default UI for it doesn’t work properly in Mobile Safari and the mobile version is retarded. So I’ve been using the popular Reeder app, which syncs with Google Reader, to read my RSS feeds.

It has its limitations — the most irritating being that it navigates via folders, not individual feeds. I organize my feeds with folders, but there are a lot of feeds I don’t check regularly or want to basically ignore most of the time. For example, my News folder has Google News, Yahoo News, and the Guardian UK’s Culture feed. I can’t look at just one of these with Reeder — they all show up, either organized by the feed itself or by time. I’d rather just be able to only look at one feed at a time.

I just got the River of News app, which seems to be much closer to what I really want in a RSS reader UI, but it seems a bit slow, interface-wise — it loads each item slowly and sometimes cuts off images. But we’ll see.

5) Instapaper Instapaper on the iPad is an incredibly useful tool. You can save entire web pages to it for later viewing. It also reformats the page and strips out everything but the main text and images, displaying it in minimalist black and white. The iOS app downloads the page and stores it locally, so you can read pages even when you’re not online. And you can send things to it from Twitter or Reeder, which rocks — if I find an interesting article in Reeder or somebody posts a link to something, I just send it to Instapaper and check it out later.

6) iBooks I haven’t bothered with the Kindle or Nook readers for iPad, because iBooks does what I want it to do and does it well. The only problem I have with it is that it won’t display PDFs in a two-page spread — the PDF page only shows up one page at a time. But it’s not a deal breaker. It’s also awesome for reading comics.

7) Nanostudio My current favorite app. Nanostudio is a portable electronic music studio, similar to Propellerheads’ Rebirth or Beatstudio. But Nanostudio is more flexible, featuring four dual-oscillator synths and an MPC-style sampler. You can mix down your loops directly into the sampler, export each part of the song individually, record samples from the mic or input, and output your mixes directly into SoundCloud. The onscreen keyboard is actually usable, and I’ve managed to make it work like a ribbon controller. (If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry. It’s music nerd speak.)

I’m sure I’ll come up with more, but this is the basic list.

But it’s a new year, and I’ve realized that I kind of miss blogging. It helps me keep my own thoughts on things in focus. Plus a lot of people seem to actually enjoy reading this thing. So I’m going to make a resolution to post at least once a week here about something.

Now, if the iOS WordPress app weren’t so slow and crash-prone….

I will love you in the morning,
In those minefield moments
Before the coffee comes pouring out
To clear the cobwebs from your head,
When you move through the house
Like a ghost who can’t remember
Exactly how you left everything,
Blinking, like a sleepy owl.

And I will love you in the evening,
After you’ve wiped the day away
With cold cream and tea tree oil,
Curled up in your purple pajamas,
Nuzzling at my shoulder with your head,
Purring, like a sleepy cat.

I will love you when you are strong,
When you are as beautiful as you are now,
On those days when everything that’s in the world
Is just the frame that wraps around you,
When you are the song that’s playing in my head,
The blood that keeps my heart moving.

And I will love you when the world
Is washed out like an old Polaroid,
When you’ve locked yourself
In rooms made of uncertainty,
When you cannot speak,
When you cannot breathe.
I will breathe for you.
I will speak for you.

I will love you when gravity has worked its dark magic,
When your back is bent and your face is a scrawled memoir.
I will love you when there are less days ahead than behind.
I will carry you when you need carrying,
I’ll remind you when you need reminding,
I will hold you when you need holding.
I’ll love you when you need loving
And even when you don’t.

And I will love you when you are gone,
And when I am gone,
And when the world has ended
And for at least five minutes afterward.
I will love you when the stars burn out of the sky
And I will love you when the light of their fire
Finally comes to tell us of their passing.

I cannot promise that I will always be a good man.
That I will always know what the right thing to do is.
I will be weak and I will be selfish and I will be a coward.
But I can promise that I will do my best,
And make each decision with your face in my mind.

I cannot promise you that we will be rich
Or that we will always be comfortable.
I cannot promise that we will never know the joys of public transit,
Or the terror of unpaid bills.
I cannot promise that we will never want for anything
But I can promise you that you will never want for laughter
And never want for love.

I can promise you this:
Wherever we go, whatever we do,
We will be amazing
And our life will be bigger than the sky.

And I can promise you one last thing,
With everything I am, and everything that is in me:
I’m gonna love you, baby, ’til the wheels come off.

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This has a real resonance for me. I’m not gay, but I still got gay-bashed in school a lot, because I wasn’t particularly macho and I spoke well and dressed…er, eclectically…and I was friends with a few gay kids and people who later came out. I had a few friends who got it worse than I did, and one of my acquaintances, Matthew Shepherd, got it about as bad as you can get it. My uncle Kevin was also gay; he contracted HIV in 1982, got full-blown AIDS in 1984 and survived until 2002, when he died of a brain tumor he’d been diagnosed with at the same time he’d been diagnosed with AIDS; the doctors didn’t remove it because at the time it was benign, and because in 1984 AIDS was a death sentence that was always quickly carried out. All of Kevin’s lovers and, later, his husbands, were treated like members of our family; his first husband Michael died in my great-grandfather’s arms. So I grew up with gay family members and friends.

But I think this message is vital not just for members of the LGBTQ community, but for every kid, especially the kids whose wonderful minds and personalities mark them as being different from the herd. Goth kids, emo kids, nerds, geeks, freaks, art fags, dorks, hippie kids…every school has at least a few of them. Like me.

I hated every minute of my schooling, from kindergarten onward. I hated the other kids, I hated the teachers, I hated the school administration. I fought every single day not to go to school. And why not? For eleven years I was sent to a place where I was subjected to emotional and often physical cruelty from my peers and indifference and often outright hostility from my educators.

Why? Because I wasn’t like my peers. I was smarter than almost all of them; sorry, but that’s just the flat truth. I was curious and easily bored and I didn’t know how to keep my head down. I was sarcastic and I was insolent, because I hated being where I was and hated the people around me and had absolutely no choice in being where I was. I liked to read, not sit around talking about fucking WWF wrestling. I liked writing music and making art on my computer. I was autodidactic; I educated myself, for the most part, because I ignored my teachers and my schoolwork. I got almost straight Fs from sixth grade onward, except usually in my English classes. When I sat down in my first class, all I could think of was making it to lunchtime without getting humiliated or assaulted; after lunch, I just waited to be sent home.

What I learned in school wasn’t reading, writing and arithmetic; I learned hatred and fear, and I learned that my nominal job in society was to do what I was told. I didn’t learn that lesson then, and at the age of thirty-two, I haven’t learned it now. I do not do what I am told.

I know I’m not alone. Maybe you were one of those kids, who sat in those uncomfortable little desk-chairs and ignored the whispers of “Hey, faggot. Hey, faggot. Hey, cocksucker,” and the spitwads and the slaps in the back of the head when the teacher wasn’t looking; one of the kids who plotted their walk home to avoid where the bullies hung out; one of those kids who sat in their bedroom and thought about putting a gun in your mouth or a noose around your neck because the years until graduation seemed to stretch out like a life sentence with absolutely no hope of parole.

Maybe you’re one of those kids now. Maybe you’re queer, maybe you’re not; maybe you’re just different, the way I was different, the way my friends were different. Maybe you’re scared and hurting and just sick to fucking death of being treated like shit because you don’t wear the same clothes or like the same music or watch the same TV. Maybe you’re having as hard a time as I did seeing the exit door.

If so, I’d like to tell you something. It’s a secret your teachers won’t tell you, your parents probably won’t tell you, it’s something you may secretly believe but deny to yourself in the face of all of the people who are telling you otherwise. The secret is this.

You’re right.

You’re smarter than they are. Really. Trust me. The great thing about Facebook is that I can look and see what the assholes who tormented me are up to. Most of them are sad, pathetic, boring adults. They have tiny lives. Most of them seem to have gotten their skanky girlfriends knocked up at an early age, and have a giant brood of nasty little piglet children. They still like shitty music. They got puffy around the face, the kind of puffy you get when you spend your life getting shit-faced on cheap beer with the rest of the retards because you can’t face the blank wall that is your future. Most of them never left home, or got more than a couple of hundred miles away. A lot of them love Jesus to a really scary degree. Hey, I don’t blame them. If I’d fucked this life up, I’d probably spend all my time dreaming of the next one too.

You’re right about your teachers, too. Most of them just don’t give a shit about you. They’re drawing a paycheck. There are a few who really care — and you’ll remember them, for the rest of your life. A few months ago I called up my wonderful guidance counselor, Clarice Boring, and told her about my impending marriage and my life, and thanked her for being one of those lights during a dark and scary time. You might have an English teacher or an art teacher — or in my fiancee’s case, drama teachers — who are like that. Man, treasure them. They’re good people and sometimes they’re more like family than your family is.

But the rest of them? Fuck them and fuck what they think of you. Don’t assume because they’re in charge that they know better than you how to live your life. They’re just as confused as you are. One of the great secrets of adulthood is that you don’t figure everything out. You just figure out how to make it look like you have.

That goes for your parents, too. Here’s another secret: your parents are just people too. They don’t have all the answers. And no, they probably don’t understand you now. When people have children, they secretly believe that their kids are going to be exactly like them, except that they won’t make the same mistakes. When it turns out that this new person you’ve created is just that, a person, with their own minds and souls and ways of thinking and wants and needs, that might be completely 180º from what you want — a lot of people can’t deal with that.

That sucks, but you know what? That’s not your fault, either. They need to learn to accept who you are and to accept the choices you make. Maybe it’ll take them a while — not everybody’s a quick study — but most of the time, they do figure it out eventually.

And if they don’t, then fuck them. Most cool people I know make their own families out of friends and lovers. If your parents can’t accept you, you just have to understand that and build a family out of the people who do. You’ll find them.

I wish I could tell you there was another way to get through all of this, but there’s not. You’re stuck with this bullshit, kid, right up until the day you get that diploma and bounce the fuck on out of wherever it is the universe started you off — the burbs or the hood or some sad little cowshit town out in the middle of Flyover Country. But from there, you can go anywhere. Anywhere. Sometimes you get to do it in style; you’ve got the grades to go to a kick-ass college and study whatever you want, or parents who can pay to see your dreams realized. If you’ve got that chance, take it.

If that’s not the case — if you’re not bound for Harvard or MIT or UCLA — you can still get out. Nobody’s got a chain around your ankle. Sometimes salvation looks like a Greyhound bus, headed to New York or San Francisco or Portland or Denver. That’s not easy, but it can be done. Plenty of people do it and do well.

I won’t bullshit you: it’s rough out here in the big world. It is. The stakes are higher. You can die out here, get killed, disappear, lose yourself to a bottle or a needle or a pipe. And people like us, who make our own way in the world, often find ourselves in places we’d rather not be, because we’re not following the easy, well-defined path.

But you can make it. And Dan Savage is right: it gets better. It does. I swear to you, kid, it gets better. You make friends. You fall in love. You become master of your own destiny, wherever the world takes you and wherever you decide to go.

And one day, you’ll find yourself over thirty, looking at the life you’ve made — a life you probably couldn’t have even imagined back in the day, back in school — and all the horror and hate and terror will seem like a bad dream that somebody else had. You won’t be that scared person anymore.

And that’s when you’ve won.

My heart breaks for you, kid, and what you’re going through. You may not believe that, but it’s true. It breaks for you and every other kid like you, like me, like us. It breaks for every kid who takes a beatdown because of how they dress or how they think or who they love. As a wise man once wrote, “What I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that though I do not know you and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”

All I can do is repeat myself: it gets better. It gets better. It gets better. You will be beautiful and you will be amazing. You will be loved, you will be admired, you will have people to share your dreams and your life with. You will win.

And fuck anybody who tells you otherwise.

Get to it.

First of all, let’s get one thing very, very clear before we go any further: your company has fucked up. Not “made a regrettable error” or “inadvertently” anything. You have caused a massive unnatural disaster. Right now, pretty much everybody on the planet hates your guts. There are guys in caves in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden, sitting around a radio playing the BBC World Service, going “Dude, seriously, fuck BP.”

I can’t imagine there’s anybody who doesn’t actually sit on your board of directors who doesn’t want to kick your asses right now. And by “you”, I mean “everybody who works for BP, including the PR department, the receptionists and probably the janitorial staff”.

So, now that we’ve got that out of the way….

I understand that it is your job to try and make BP’s relations with the public as optimal as possible. You want the public to love your company, to want to consume your products and make everybody a lot of money. You do this, by and large, by figuring out ways to make BP look like the coolest, most environmentally-conscious company in the world. This is a very difficult thing to do when you’re dumping gazillions of gallons of death sauce into the Gulf of Mexico. So you’re probably very busy right now.

One thing you might want to do, however, is to recognize that you’re going to have to ignore one of the basic tenets of public relations: what I mean is, you have to admit you’re wrong. Really, really wrong. Like, the only thing you could have done that was worse was to basically just light the fucking planet on fire while raping babies.

You also need to admit that you were completely careless and ignored your own engineers, who told you this was probably going to happen. You also ignored the fact that your oil well starting actually falling apart like Lindsey Lohan on a mescaline margarita in March, which might have alerted you to a problem.

We know why you did. You’re a corporation. Your job is to make money. And you were afraid you were going to not make as much money if you stopped and actually built an oil well that could actually do the job it was intended for. Let me underline that: there was never, ever any chance you’d lose money on this. You just might have made less money in the short term.

Look: you sell petroleum. You sell the one thing that every nation on the planet is willing to go to war to possess. You’re like Nino Brown in New Jack City, if the entire world was Chris Rock. You’re our momma, you’re our daddy, you’re our nigga in the alley. You’re our pusherman.

The worst that might have happened was that you spent a few million dollars shoring up the Deepwater Horizon, and then you would have gone on making lots more money because it wouldn’t have blown the fuck up. As far as the world is concerned, the only good thing about this spill is that every barrel of that oil is one less barrel you can make a profit on. You’re losing billions of dollars here.

Not that anybody feels sorry for you on that account, so don’t try that tack. It won’t work. In fact, there’s only really one strategy that will be at all effective in saving your company from a planet-wide boycott and bad press the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Adolf and Eva did their William Tell routine in the bunker in 1945.

It’s very simple. It will work. Nobody will like you, but at least they won’t hate you to the point where they might actually pressure their governments into hounding you into bankruptcy and madness.

Just write a letter. I will even draft it for you. It needs to read something like this:

Dear Earth,

We fucked up. Badly. Very badly. We are completely and utterly horrified by what has happened. Every time we think of what our company’s greed for profit and carelessness has caused, we run to the toilet and puke. We drink a lot these days. Every time we see another picture of an oil-covered bird, we think about doing a full-on Jonestown thing here at BP HQ. Just put the toxin in the air vents and pump it into every office so we don’t have to live with the total horror and guilt for the incredibly awful thing that we specifically have caused to happen. Not to mention the people who died on the rig. That makes us sick whenever we look at ourselves in a mirror, which is why we’ve had all mirrors and reflective surfaces removed from BP HQ until this all gets resolved. We just can’t look at ourselves.

We have no excuses. We have no spin. We take full responsibility for this spill. It was our fault, nobody else’s. It was a completely avoidable accident, and we let it happen because we didn’t really give a shit. We figured that there was a pretty good chance this wouldn’t happen. We were so incredibly wrong. We are thoughtless and careless and greedy. We are grubby little pigs rooting at the teat of 21st century capitalism.

Here’s what we’re going to do to fix this problem: whatever it takes, whatever it costs, as quickly as possible. We are not going to try and save our own equipment or our revenue stream from this oil well, if doing so means that a single extra gallon of this shit burbles up into the Gulf. We know we’re simply going to take a massive loss here. We don’t care. Plugging that hole is our first priority. Everything else we do, all our business, comes second to this.

And once we finally do that, we’re going to spend as many billions of dollars as it takes to clean up our incredibly massive mess. We don’t put a limit on how much we want to earn, so we’re not going to put a limit on how much we’re going to spend. We’re going to usher in a new century of corporate responsibility.

In return, we hope that you understand that we fucked up, and that we’re going to do better in the future. We’re not going to cut corners, we’re going to be careful, and we’re going to keep bringing you this substance that you all rely on in a safe and ethical fashion. We hope that if we can make you truly believe that we’re doing everything we can, you might still buy our product.

Your friends, Beyond Petroleum

So, uh, yeah. I’d go with something like that.