Dearest Mark,

by Luke Homans

In honor of the announcement of your retirement, we here at Gargoyle would like to issue our official apology. It has come to our attention that your decision stems nearly entirely from our repeated “harassment” of you and your good name in our magazine.

Your presidency at this esteemed university commenced way back in good old 2014; with it, too, came our immediate defacement of your marvelous physique. The cover of the fall issue that year, as I’m sure you remember, depicted a snake-like wolverine, branded with the phrase “Go Blue Motherfuckers”, jockeyed by your much younger but still considerably hairy body clad in a sexy red bikini. While we refuse to apologize for the image itself, because it’s fucking awesome as hell, we will reluctantly retract our representation of your body. Sorry. We should’ve given you a bigger bulge.

Moving on from your captivating chest hair, we would like to redirect your attention to the fall 2016 issue. That’s right, we’re finally responding to that other angry email you sent us (clearly they are not an effective deterrent, not sure why you thought you should keep sending them). Anyways, that issue offered a brief critique of the completely flawless system of naming things at this university. Who would’ve thought that tacking the letter “M” or the word “blue” on every single new thing that’s ever been instituted here could be cliché or boring? Certainly not us. That should have never been grounds for mockery. It’s a perfect system Marky, how could we have stooped so low? Subsequently, we will be requesting that you change your own name, for the sake of continuity, to M’ark ShlissBlue. You can change it back once you leave we suppose, but quite frankly, that would make us blue.

Now what would an apology letter be if we didn’t tackle your enigmatic sexual history and, quite frankly, prowess? In the spring of 2018, an addendum was published in our magazine citing some very incriminating things, such as the fact that you probably have polio, do not know how to put on a condom, and are being frequently lobbied by Big Abortion to decrease sexual education measures in order to increase the rate of unwanted pregnancies. This is all the more concerning considering your own sexual promiscuity, and the discovery of your sex dungeon (or rather, Master Schlissel’s Pleasure Palace) underneath the Union in 2019. The purpose of this paragraph is to once again shed light on your private life, because the free press is dying and we are here to give it some sloppy mouth-to-mouth CPR that we forgot about from freshman year of high school. Everyone knows about your latex dog costume, Master, stop trying to cover it up. This isn’t kink-shaming, trust us, we’re the wrong people for that, but, in this case, we owe you no apology for the truth.

Finally, just for shits and giggles, we would like to highlight some of the less than flattering names that you have been called in the past. From “Mank Skizzle” to “Daddy Schlis”, there’s a unique nickname (dare I say uniqname) that will tickle everyone’s fancy. Some of our personal favorites are as follows: “Stone Cold Schlissel”, “Daddy-In-Chief”, “Mark (Gristle, Thistle, Missile, Whistle)”, and of course, “Mark Schnitzel”. But wait, you thought we were done? Of course not. Just for good measure, here’s some fresh ones you can try on for size: “Mark Stinky”, “MS (Multiple Sclerosis)”, “Cum Dumpster”, “Resident President”, “Sloppy Schlissy”, and finally, “BisMark, ND”. Alright, fine, that’s it.

Well, we’d say that was a pretty sincere apology, considering the fact that you’re leaving the university due to being a little piss baby who couldn’t handle a little ribbing from a comedy magazine. I guess this is goodbye, our last reMarks. Hopefully whoever replaces you has a name that can generate some better puns. Don’t worry, the image of you in that skimpy bikini will be ingrained in all of our minds forever. So, on that note, we hate to see you go, Bissell®, but we love to watch you leave.