I was just gonna come here to post a typical Craigslist Files. It was going to be a series of woefully misguided ads with a healthy dose of mockery. We would have had some laughs, maybe a couple of beers, talked about old times, the way Mr. Peterson's comb-over would stick up in the middle of science class without him even knowing it, that stolen kiss in Tommy Beecher's garden. But no, something else decided to creep into my veins via the poison pen of the craigslist Writing Gigs section.

I'm a freelancer, so I get a lot of my work through various online job boards. I'll admit, of all its sections, the employment features on craigslist have the best Worthwhile to Crap ratio (about 1:3). So, when I saw that a long-running theater company in my city had a gig for writers posted, I thought I'd check it out. "My schedule is open tonight and they're not asking for any money," I thought, "It couldn't hurt to give it a try."

Oh, but it did hurt. Like a medieval-style hot iron disinfecting and cauterizing a battle laceration.

You see, there are two kinds of long-running creative collectives. One, which occupies the upper stratum of creative professions, consists of talented individuals who know the benefit of collaboration and serious work. The other, from the much more densely-populated lower stratum of amateurs, consists of painfully untalented people who don't have sense enough to quit something at which they inherently suck. Guess which variety I attended.

I should have known right away that it was going to be horrible. Aside from the fact that it was posted on craigslist, the fetid river up which all awfulness swims to spawn, the group was comprised almost entirely of sad, middle-aged single people who didn't have enough dignity not to show up in their "I've given up" clothes. We're talking dirty, white undershirts and flip-flops here.

And then the readings began.

To call these writers hacks would be an insult to the institution of hackery. They did both rehearsed and cold readings of scripts that made high school talent shows look like Marivaux. What's worse, the group attempted to critique each other's work after each disaster collided with the eyes and ears of actual humans. That's right, I spent three hours of my life watching people who suck at comprehension attempting to comprehend incomprehensible works of "comedy".

By the time I left that sad, dilapidated black-box theater I literally felt dirty. I had lost my appetite and my skin itched. It wasn't until much later that I realized this all could have been avoided if the nitwits who run this group had simply categorized the meeting correctly. This was not a gig. It wasn't even a gateway to a possible gig. This should have gone in Activities or Groups under the Community section so there could be no pretense of professionalism whatsoever.

I suppose this was just a lesson I had to learn. Like a carpenter who gets too carefree with his band saw, I strayed too close to the unforgiving machinery of craigslist and came away bleeding.