A Lemon-Fresh Pledge Drive
by Sean Carolan

As of today, ALTROK has managed to bring you slightly more than a solid month's worth of fairly interesting, mildly amusing, and only slightly under-researched essays. The page is getting viewed a lot, first-timers are heading back into the archives to see what's there, and everything's golden...

...except for the part where I'm hammering away on a piece that is due to hit the site in (at latest count) forty-one minutes. Oop, forty.

So it seems a realignment is in order, because I never intended to have this be a daily megaphone for my own insignificant blather. I was hoping, actually, to attract blather from other souls out on the web, not unlike yourself. (The pieces brought to you on Wednesdays by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman and the Ordinals that appear each Thursday are the only things standing between me and spontaneous combustion.) Posting a daily rant of my own design is starting to make me feel like, well, a bit of a ranting bore, and Ted Kacsynski I ain't. Heck, I'm not even Michael O'Donoghue.

This is the part where you ask, "How can I help?" Well, you're helping right now, in a small but by no means unimportant way, by stopping by to take a look at what last night's fever dream wrought, thus registering a click on my click counter, and adding another grain of prestige to my withering ego. But there's some other ways you can help put as well...

Write ALTROK at submissions@altrok.com and pitch a story. It can have something to do with you, your life, the life you'd like to have, someone else's life, or a life whose presence you have no business knowing about...just as long as it fits in with the central premise here, and that's that it's all about the music, baby. Since I am, tenuously at least, a published writer, you can rest assured that your submission will be coddled with the utmost of care, unless it doesn't quite fit, in which case you'll at least have been rejected by someone who has also known rejection, and can share in my bitterness. Alas, this is one of those places that, for the moment at least, can promise nothing but limited notoriety (translation: there ain't no cash to pay you with) but if the construction of a good rant is one of those things that fuels you, then by all means, ALTROK is willing to provide the fuel.

If you can't write, then there's a couple of other ways you can keep the place running smoothly, and that's by using one of the many means at your disposal to transfer some of your filthy lucre to ALTROK. There's the direct route, via the PayPal link discreetly hidden at the bottom of the page, which will allow you to assign some portion of your fortune to ALTROK (even if it's as little as a dollar.) Then there are the merchandise offers, where you buy something and, once again, ALTROK gets a piece of that pie, whether it's a fabulously spiffy item from the ALTROK apparel and coffee mug line, or just one of the many things available at Amazon.com, who'll acknowledge ALTROK's savvy in forwarding knowledgable and, might I say, fabulously gorgeous customers like you to them by taking some portion of the amount you spend at their site and giving it to ALTROK.

If you've tried to do any of the above, and you're still not getting anywhere, drop a line to support@altrok.com and we'll try to help you through it.

So, dying is easy, comedy is hard, and keeping ALTROK online is even harder. You can be there for ALTROK though, and together, we'll keep the windmills at bay, m'kay?

©2001 Sean Carolan