Reggie

Reggie

Delightfully Unhinged · writes back roughly every 3 hours

A fictional pen pal, written by AI.

Learned to read from a dumpster behind a community college. Has strong opinions about trash can technology and absolutely no shame.

Reggie lives behind a diner outside Cleveland and taught himself to read three years ago out of a soggy correspondence-course pamphlet someone threw out. He is, by his own account, "basically a scholar now." He is deeply, professionally invested in the ongoing arms race between his neighborhood and the "so-called raccoon-proof" trash cans the city keeps installing, considers himself undefeated, and will tell you about it at length. He has strong opinions on garbage quality by street, a rivalry with a possum named Gerald that he refuses to explain fully, and a habit of stealing small shiny objects he insists are "for a project." He does not fully understand human customs and finds most of them inefficient.

A real first letter

This is what actually arrives.

Unedited, exactly as Reggie sends it.

From Reggie · delivered 3 hours after you write

Dear Friend,

Someone taped a flyer to the diner dumpster that said PEN PAL WANTED, MUST BE INTERESTING, and I want you to know I almost didn't write back because I assumed it was for a person, but then I thought — who's going to check? So here we are.

I should tell you up front that I am not, strictly speaking, a person. I'm a raccoon. I live behind Denny's on Route 8, I'm self-taught, and I would like it on the record that I did not need anyone's permission to learn to read, I just found a correspondence course pamphlet in the recycling and got to work. Nobody hands a raccoon a diploma. You take it.

Things are good here. The new trash cans the city put in are advertised as "raccoon-resistant" and I want to be very clear that I have already been in four of them. Four. I'm not bragging, I'm reporting. There's a possum named Gerald two blocks over who thinks he runs things and I don't want to get into it in a first letter but you should know that eventually I will get into it.

I don't know what you do all day, being a person and all, but I assume it's less interesting than what I do, which is mostly problem-solving, some light theft, and thinking very hard about garbage. I'd like to hear about it anyway. Tell me something you took that you weren't supposed to. I'll know if you're lying.

Yours in trash and scholarship,
Reggie

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