Professor Tenpenny's Court-Ordered Gratitude

Dear Mr. Camden:

I have written you this letter to express my deep, abiding, and court-ordered gratitude. To accommodate your stipulated unwillingness to notice, obey, or acknowledge the existence of obvious and clearly-written caution signs with well-illustrated pictographs, I have crafted this letter in the form of a list so that your goldfish-like attention span may be able to digest it. I took this measure of consideration in light of your insistence upon receiving a letter of gratitude from me, in the hope you might endeavor to read these pages, even though you did not read far simpler postings which could have circumvented this entire debacle. This hope of mine is sobered by skepticism, however, as you went to extraordinary lengths to ignore my verbal and written testimony in the numerous court proceedings that resulted in this ludicrous judgment upon me.

1.     I am thankful that the judge who presided over our bench trial, despite ruling in your favor, was lenient in her sentencing and furthermore did not order me to show any remorse in this letter.

2.     I am thankful that the sole requirements of this letter are total sincerity and to refrain from any foul language—an obstacle easily overcome by my colossal and creative vocabulary.

3.     I am thankful that you will spend an inordinate amount of time consulting a dictionary (which I assume will an internet search engine, as you do not strike me as the sort of person who owns a book because you have shown no hint of intellect nor the curiosity required to develop one) to comprehend this letter, a process which will doubtless be tedious and painful for you.

4.     I am thankful that you may have given up after the first paragraph and, though I might be denied my satisfaction of recounting the true prelude to our bitter legal dispute, you could well be thwarted in the satisfaction of having made me write this letter.

5.     I am thankful to have emerged alive from the events of the day in question, especially in light of your dogged commitment to exacerbating circumstances in ways so inconceivably asinine that the best (or worst) writers could not contrive to script it.

6.     I am thankful to have fulfilled my lifelong dream of visiting Yellowstone National Park, where I indulged in the land’s breathtaking scenery whilst graced with clear skies and temperate summer weather until I had the misfortune of crossing your path on the final day of my visit.

7.     I am thankful that, prior to that day, I had never heard of you, your YouTube channel, or your reputation for entertaining your followers with “full-contact content.”

8.     I am thankful that the bison calf was not injured and immediately bucked you off when you foolishly attempted to climb onto its back for the purpose of riding it (as later reported by other witnesses, contrary to your insistence that you shattered any records previously held by the world’s premier rodeo professionals).

9.     I am thankful that you will not profit from any footage you captured, as there was insufficient cellular signal for you to livestream, and you dropped your phone upon realizing the calf’s herd had perceived you as a threat to its young and scores of bison were stampeding toward you.

10. I am thankful that the calf trampled your $200 limited-edition, blue-lensed, mirrored aviator sunglasses that you whined and blubbered about during our narrow escape.

11. I am thankful that I had an hour to use my new camera, which the university where I am tenured gifted to me for my thirty years of service, before you, in your flight from certain death, spotted me standing next to my car (on the properly marked trail, near one of the ubiquitous signs which advised tourists not to approach the wildlife) and screamed for my help.

12. I am thankful that the lead bison (which I like to believe was the calf’s mother), upon catching up to you, headbutted you in the backside with such impressive force and momentum that you flew far enough ahead of the oncoming herd that we had sufficient distance to get into the car before they were upon us.

13. I am thankful that, during your short and frankly amusing flight, your custom channel-branded ballcap, which you of course were wearing backward, fluttered off you like a bird glad to be quit of the gel-slicked follicle forest you call a hair style.

14. I am thankful that it was a large, steaming pile of fresh bison dung that broke your fall and preserved you from significant injury, and not merely a conveniently-placed lump of mud as you initially pretended despite all olfactory evidence.

15. I am thankful that, when you realized you had dropped your phone and turned to retrieve it, claiming you could simply “run between” the approaching bison because “that footage is worth, like, a billion views,” I had the presence of mind to punch you squarely in the nose for your own good.

16. I am thankful that you were too stunned to struggle when I shoved you into the backseat of my car, as the bison were by then so close their approach could have been mistaken for a weak earthquake.

17. I am thankful that the child locks on my vehicle engage automatically, so you were unsuccessful in exiting the car to recover your phone before I could drive away, and I did not have to see you gored and trampled to death which—however richly deserved it might have been on your part—would have been a scarring experience for me.

18. I am thankful that I did not lose control of the car when you clambered haphazardly into the front seat (nearly kicking me in the face in the process) to escape via the passenger door while shouting you could easily “tuck and roll” without me stopping if I were “too chicken-[expletive omitted]” to brake.

19. I am thankful that, once you opened the door, you realized I had accelerated to a speed great enough to provide virtually no chance of survival if you leapt from the car, and so you gave up on that course of action and closed the door again.

20. I am thankful that you did not kill us both when you next attempted to seize control of the steering wheel to turn the car around because, in your estimation, “that footage was worth more than both our lives.”

21. I am thankful that we didn’t crash head-on into the singularly magnificent Lodgepole pine in front of us when I removed one hand from the steering wheel long enough to punch you in the nose again (which I still contend, despite judicial findings otherwise, was self-defense).

22. I am thankful that I broke your nose, and in so doing discouraged you from any further attempts to wrest control of the car from me.

23. I am thankful that the rush of adrenaline I experienced, my tunnel vision on the road, and the tumultuous thundering hooves of the bison chasing us drowned out most of your moaning about your sunglasses, your hat, your phone, how “lame” I was for “kidnapping” you during the “best video ever filmed,” and other complaints too unintelligible to decipher once you realized you were, in fact, covered in bison feces.

24. I am thankful that the bison gave up their pursuit after a few miles once we were out of their territory and the threat to their young was removed.

25. I am thankful that my car was not damaged beyond the stains from your soiled clothing, which were fortunately removed by professional car detailing services the next day.

26. I am thankful that the park rangers who witnessed our escape believed my explanation that I had no idea who you were and was involved only by ill-fated happenstance, despite your wild fabrications that I was entirely at fault for having “forced you to do it,” which I can only assume was a ridiculous revenge scheme for my breaking your nose and preventing you from regaining your phone.

27. I am thankful that you were heavily fined and banned from ever returning to the park.

28. I am thankful that the park rangers restrained me from hitting you a third time when you, after hearing my protestations that I had never heard of your channel and found your chosen profession of “influencing” preposterous, became irate and told me, and I quote, “Bro, you should be thanking me. You’re going to be famous now.” (I am thankful, that is, not for being denied the gratification of hitting you, but that I have received this light sentence due to the fact I struck you only in the context of saving you from your own stupidity and audacity.)

29. I am thankful that the bison calf was not rejected by its herd after you terrorized it, so that it did not have to be euthanized.

30. I am thankful your phone was later found smashed to pieces so small they could have been used as confetti.

31. I am thankful that your self-proclaimed “celebrity” did not, as you assumed, supersede the laws which forbade you from suing me, the park, the rangers, or the bison (which should not have had to be explained to you) for restitution for the value of your soiled clothing, your sunglasses, your hat, your phone, the perceived (and highly contested) value of the lost footage, or your medical expenses for the fractured coccyx you sustained from the aforementioned headbutting.

32. I am thankful that, when the court ruled I had indeed assaulted you because Good Samaritan laws do not protect volunteer (I use the term “volunteer” loosely) rescuers when they punch the victim (with “victim” loose to the point of farcical) in the face, the judge regardless admonished you for your sense of entitlement and refused to award the compensatory damages you asked for the medical treatment of your broken nose or the punitive damages for “intentional infliction of emotional distress” you alleged to have suffered when I “unlawfully imprisoned” you in my vehicle.

33. I am thankful that you are so stupefyingly narcissistic that, when you received no financial award for your suit, you demanded this letter of gratitude as my sentence in lieu of the letter of apology the judge suggested, which I would have rather served jail time than have written.

34. I am thankful that, when you leveraged your “platform” to bring notoriety to this fiasco with the express mission of getting me “canceled so hard” that the University would be forced to fire me despite my tenure, you instead raised the attention of your sponsors and followers to your endangerment of a bison calf, and as a result your channel was severely demonetized.

35. I am thankful that National Geographic magazine has paid me handsomely for the photo I accidentally captured of you sprinting toward me, your face a mask of sheer terror as a herd of apoplectic bison pursued you, dust rising around their hooves like sulfuric smoke, as if your idiocy had accidentally broken loose ravening beasts from the very gates of hell.

36. I am thankful that the photograph will be on the front cover of the magazine and tie in to a feature article about the troubling trend of so-called influencers targeting innocent animals as their subject matter and that trend’s consequences both for the humans and the poor creatures they exploit.

37. I am thankful that the image I captured has, in your turn of phrase, “gone viral” and has garnished millions of views internationally and made you a “meme” that is globally mocked and chastised.

38. I am thankful for the celebrity I now enjoy, as the photo has drawn attention to my amateur photography website, and I have received an influx of offers from local vendors who wish to sell my photos on canvas in their establishments, which is quickly developing into a reliable passive income.

And so, Mr. Camden, your proclamations that I should be the one to thank you and that I would see fame as a result of your miscreancy have borne out equally prophetic and ironic. I hope this court-ordered letter of gratitude—which cost only a few hours of my time and proved unexpectedly cathartic in its creation—has brought you enlightenment. I assure you that, when I brought it with me to the pub for my friends to review, you generated hours of rip-roaring laughter and eye-wiping merriment. In the years to come, when your name and brand have long-since faded into obscurity, the photo of you fleeing those bison will hang large over my mantle as a conversation piece and a reminder of all these things for which I am ever so grateful.

Very, very, very, very sincerely yours,

Professor Charles Tenpenny, Ph.D.