I hate the word edgy. I’ve never liked the word extreme. Same goes for eclectic. I’m okay with the word ecunemical, but that’s only because i’m not 100% sure what it means.
In its capitalized form, the fifth letter of our alphabet looks like a broken pitchfork turned on its side, or a crudely drawn mirror image of the number 3. Written in lowercase, it looks like a decapitated midget laughing at you, mocking your failures & embarrassments. It’s the most commonly used letter, and you’re common & pathetic for using it.
Georges Perec is a hero, a visionary & a prophet, and if I could follow his example and strike the letter E from every word in this essay (another word I hate, another word that begins with e). It’s loved by typographers & codebreakers; I hate typographers & codebreakers. It’s chosen so often on Wheel of Fortune—a nightly parade of jovial dipshittery overseen by an ultra-rightwing conspiracy theorist and his brittle near-mute hostess—that they just go ahead and give it to you automatically in the final round.
Musically, E is for the Eagles. It’s for Englebert Humperdinck. Electric Light Orchestra. Eagle Eye Cherry. EMF. Eddie Vedder. Elton John. Eric Clapton. Everclear. All objectively terrible—do not under any circumstances @ me about this—the letter E at the beginning of a musicians name/project means you’re about to be introduced to an artistic compost heap filled with chlamydia & tears. And because it’s the first letter in the word ecstasy, and because ecstasy was a popular drug in the UK during the early 90’s, a fistful of giggling briton buffoons thought they were geniuses for working the letter E—which I will again remind you is far & away the most frequently used letter of our alphabet—into their songs.
Even photographers at the most popular UK music newspaper couldn’t help themselves.
The founders of this country may not have known much (they did know the necessity of governmental checks & balances due to the corrupting nature of power), but one thing they did know for sure is that no US state should begin with the letter E. It’s there in the constitution just before the emoluments clause. And if you ever happen to come across a city or town that starts with the letter E on your next road trip, just keep fucking driving because each and every one of them is a rotting shithole that’s been abandoned by god: El Paso, Eugene, my hometown of El Cajon, Ellensburg, East Hampton (so many East ____’s).
It’s a letter so untrustworthy that scholastic grading systems just skip it entirely—straight from D to F. Followed by an exclamation point, it’s the worst channel on basic cable that doesn’t involve the word Fox. It equals mc2, and if e is my least favorite letter, mc is my least favorite two-letter combination at the beginning of a word—McDonald’s, MC Hammer, half my Irish ancestors. It’s also used as a mathematical constant, but we all know that nothing is constant except for this sharp stabbing pain behind both my temples and the suffering we endure until our inevitable death. Everything else in this clogged toilet of a universe is chaos & flux and so fuck e for trying to tell us any different.
Scott Creney 