My Dearest Saint James
First of all I would like to thank you for all the time and effort you took out of your busy schedule to write not a letter, but a critique of an old letter that I had sent to you. That was quite a project but somehow you managed to pull it off and I am humbled and immensely impressed. Thank you also for sending me your poetry that I know you treasure deeply and for remembering how much I adore poetry in general and yours in particular. I am presently enjoying summer in the desert, mornings in blazing heat, afternoons spent suffocating, and nights praying for a nice cool prison cell. Next month I finally start school I’m looking forward to it because it will give me something constructive to do, Dixie State College is known as the Mormon Harvard, they have a fishing class that I might take. My mom is getting a divorce from her husband you would find the details of this fucking fiasco hilarious. My mom was totally on the rebound after divorcing my dad after 25 years and married this curious fellow named Manuel that she met at an AA meeting. First of all he looks like a Mexican Gomer Pyle the giant adams apple and all. He hasn’t had a real job in the 4 years that they’ve been married except for being in the National Guard which he believes is quite an accomplishment since they let him play soldier for 2 days a month. He has a giant American flag pinned to the wall in the garage which he probably pledges allegiance to every morning, he also is painfully addicted to Alcoholics Anonymous, he believes that it has turned him into a wise and spiritual person and to prove this he listens to Native American flute music every morning on his cassette tape player. Being the great American patriot that he is he decided to take the Utah Correctional Officer Exam to keep us all safe…..but alas he failed it which I didn’t know was possible. But did Manuel give up? No, he decided to take the Highway Patrol Test, unfortunately he couldn’t recite the alphabet backwards and was promptly told to leave. His next venture was to be hired on as an automatic garage door opener installer but was fired a week later when they realized that he didn’t quite know how one actually goes about installing a garage door opener. Being the resilient and delusional ne’er do well that he is he refused to admit his stupidity and came up with his most audacious scheme yet…he went to his National Guard command and requested to go to………AIRBORNE SCHOOL! For obvious reasons the US Armed Forces were in desperate need of 48 year old out of shape National Guardsmen to become Paratroopers and kill freedom haters. It is a 3 week course and one of the most difficult and grueling that the Army has to offer, but our brave hero never flinched…he prepared. He stayed up into the wee hours watching the Military channel and old war movies, he ran a mile every other morning his face always showing that steely eyed determined look of his, he went to 3 AA meetings and worked a step a day for 2 whole weeks until finally the day arrived when the US would pay thousands of dollars to turn a skinny 48 year old baby boomer into fucking Rambo. He made sure to give my mother the play by play of his entire journey the first day was the Physical Readiness Test this test being so torturous and brutal it would make a Spartan puke but through sheer determination Manuel was able to do the required 45 pushups and 50 sit-ups, he made it to day 2 and then 3 and then 4.….. but then disaster struck, the bane of every soldier from the Roman Legions to the Doughboys in World War 1 and into the present day brought our valiant Manuel to his knees so excruciating was the pain he immediately checked himself into the Emergency Room where the doctors ruefully verified that…..that….yes he had blisters on his feet. No warrior has ever been able to handle a really bad blister especially when the skin comes off and it stings when you touch it. And if this wasn’t tragic enough his hemorrhoids were acting up as well (this really was his excuse, you can't make this shit up), this panoply of malicious maladies was too much to overcome even for a professed Communist fighter like El Manuel. And so he returned home once again as a failure, most men would have built a shack in the woods by a pond and shunned society as a recluse in disgrace, but Manuel would have none of it, if the US didn’t need him to jump out of planes and kill Bin Laden he would do the next best thing…he would obsess over Computer Viruses and the Car Battery in my mom’s Jeep. He spent his days replacing the electrodes on the Jeep battery checking and rechecking the connections my mother came to terms about being late to work everyday because there were jumper cables attached to everything under the hood, Manuel took no chances that the Jeep would ever get kind of low on juice and we love him for it. Everything seemed to be going smoothly and life was getting back to normal Manuels’ blisters had healed and his hemorrhoids had scabbed over I thought the worst had passed but I was wrong….terribly wrong. My father had picked me up and we were on our way to his house for a summer barbecue when my phone rang. At once I recognized Manuels’ panicked voice he was mumbling and stammering uncontrollably I knew straight away that something terrible had happened, he calmed down enough to give me the news that our computer had a ……..VIRUS! My first reaction was to do the honorable thing and kill myself but I didn’t have a gun because i'm on parole, so I made myself to stop shaking and try to regain some semblance of composure and asked him the details of our computer virus. The truth turned out to be worse than my imagination could have ever conjured, so sinister and devoid of human compassion and dignity that only the cruelest evil scientist could have come up with it. Please Saint James sit down before you read this I know that your getting on in years but you must know the truth……the virus…..well…. IT TURNS THE SCREENSAVER …………
S I D E W A Y S!!!!! So I quickly hung up the phone because in all honesty I really didn’t fucking care, (why can’t someone come up with a “good” computer virus that lets you get free porn or prints out $20 bills?) So what did Manuel do? He went absolutely ape shit like the true National Guard logistical Sergeant weekend warrior Mexican patriot that he is, he pinned me down about it, “what websites do you go to?” “Maybe it was Youtube?” “Have you been running the Antivirus?” “Do you think the virus is an alcoholic?” he took the whole computer to Best Buy, the terminal, the monitor, and just in case it too had become infected, our valiant mouse. And what did those cynical bastards at Best Buy do?? They told him all they could do was sell him another computer… what a shitty world we live in. And to top it off there never was a virus a program had gotten erased and it fucked with the screen saver for some reason. What a life huh? I went to the Esquire website and your all over there I was amused to see that I was mentioned in one of the letters but I think that I would rather write poetry than play scrabble. Anyhow, I must be really bored because this is the longest letter that I’ve ever written. Write me a real letter next time lazy ass.
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