Saturday, February 25, 2006

letters never sent

Dear Charlie,
Please share with us why weekdays are awesome?

Well, dear reader, that is a very interesting question because you see, weekdays aren't always awesome, mainly only so when you are unemployed and your roommates are employed, because then, when you are listening to Le Tigre in the middle of the day and get an urge to crank it, to shake the foundations of your flimsy little apartment with feminist fury and to dance around like a maniac, well, you can do that. However, on weekends, shame and fear of disturbing your roommates from their rest keeps you and the volume and the dancing and the freedom in check.

*******************************

Dear McSweeneys,
Last night, I was mildly drunk but not totally tired and so I couldn't get to sleep, so I picked up your most recent issue, #18, to read the Joyce Carol Oates story. She has always been one of those writers on my get-around-to-reading-this-person list and the story only confirmed her place on that list, maybe even shifted her closer to the top of the queue. However, I was totally distracted by two glaring typos in the story. I don't understand. This is not a huge publication. It is only published quarterly. There are twenty or so interns listed on the masthead, two copy editors, a managing editor, and a general editor. How these typos in this story were allowed to slip past the attention of all these people confused me greatly. The fact that I wad mildly inebriated and caught these typos made your staff's inability to do so all the more puzzling.

For example, on page 214, the following sentence presents itself: "None of is could recall Father very clearly now." That makes no sense, whatsoever. Yes, Oates is doing something very weird and beautiful with her method of narrating this story, using a first person plural "we" to have the voice of three children talk (possibly others - the dead children also?) and then refers to each of these kid's actions in the third person singular, never having one of the kids narrating with an "I did this," making me very confused for a bit about who was narrating this story, but surely, that "is" is not part of that technique, surely that "is" was meant to be an "us."

What I am getting at here is that I am umemployed at the moment and need a job badly. So if your two copy editors together are unable to catch these things, then I know of an excellent candidate who would not mind at all relocating to San Francisco were it to work for this publication. That person, of course, this writer.

Thanks,
Charlie

*******************************

Dear Bobby Cuza,
If you were not on NY1, I am not sure I would watch the station nearly as much as I currently do. And watching it isn't even a guarantee that I am going to see you, since you aren't an anchor, but a transit reporter. And some days, there are no transit stories, and as a result, no Bobby Cuza crooning in that beautiful voice the latest news to me about MTA. The days when you do do a story, I am so much happier that my morning started off with this bit of butterflies in the stomach - everything following it just seems nicer - sort of like on those days when you wake up after getting laid, how good a mood you are in toward the whole world. Well, some days, there's no story from you, and thus none of that glow from me toward the whole world

So, surely there must be an easier way for us to get together, one less beholden to the whims of chance and subway strikes. So here's what I am thinking, every day when I would normally be tuning into NY1, normally about ten after I shower and as I am eating my cereal, you can come over to my apartment and stand where my tv is and just talk about anything, so I can get my daily dose of your pretty voice and pretty face. And who knows where that might lead. Let's just take things one step at a time.

Faithfully yours,
Charlie

*******************************

Dear Charlie,
Get a life.

Well, dear reader, as I recently told my boyfriend Bobby Cuza, one step at at time, one step at a time.

No comments:

Post a Comment