- - - -
Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
- - - -
L E T T E R S .
[Please send printable correspondence to mcsweeneysmail@yahoo.com. Thank you.] - - - - DEAR READERS AND WRITERS OF THE LETTERS SECTION: We are trying to make this section easier on the eyes. There will be fewer letters, and more editing. If you feel you are being passed over unduly, you may note as much at the top of your letter. We are your friends, and will try to listen. - - - - Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000From: Gregory Purcell Subject: My home. Dear McSweeney's, We've just recieved ergonomic pens where I work. Incidentally, I've found a job. Two jobs, in fact. With one of them, I get to work at home. My home in Chicago. My home in Chicago. I hope that everyone feels good about the places they live in. We should all stop to consider the travelling salesmen and the truck drivers, the international business consultants and the full-time carnival hucksters. Think about the circus people and the FBI. The people whose home is the next town away and the next town after that, a drift of motel rooms and clammy, well-lit interrogation chambers. Let's dream of the rootless ones--those sad few who have traded in all local and familial ties to press hands with a few strangers, to catch the next train, to put food on their laps and attempt to get a bite down before their rendevous with that one, final, anonymous client--yes, let's dream of them, as we sink back into our cautious, ample beds. Anyway, I've found a job. Thanks, Greg Purcell - - - - Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000From: Whitney Pastorek Subject: Postcards from the hedge Dear McSweeney's, Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. The neighbors have torn down the bushes around their house and are now erecting a chainlink fence. The pile of dirt looks lonely without the bushes, but from the roof, oh, what a view. The kids send their love and hope you'll remember them with presents (Sally of course is beside herself with anticipation!). As for me, I cry myself to sleep each and every night of your absence as I look at the dust patch in the moonlight and dream about what used to be. I think the boys of summer have gone-- don't look back you can never look back. thanks so much whitney pastorek - - - - Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000From: Robert Beier Subject: From your office correspondent Dear McSweeney's, So I was reading your letters section last night, relaxing after my day at work following the long weekend. I still smelled of bug spray and the great outdoors. I read your editing blurb. I read down the letters and found mine not. I started to panic. I started to cry. My girl came up to my heaving shoulders and asked what was wrong. I said my letters hadn't made it into the letters page. Edited out. Wiped out from electronic land. She went into the kitchen and took The Very Large Spatula from its nail and whapped me over the head. This usually works when I am overwrought. It worked and I calmed down. My girl (I'm her boy) told me I hadn't written a letter to you in a while. Oh, oh, now I see. I must write a letter. Now. I have a t-shirt that is in Spanish. It is a baseball t-shirt. It says in translation "Spring in Venezuela 2000 March 19-21 Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Atlanta Braves" What a momento. Hold on to your donde es? I couldn't believe it. Major League Baseball strolls into Venezuela in the Fall and declares it to be the Spring for their convenience. The nerve. I am surprised the offended Venezuelan's didn't riot. Didn't throw those free balls right into the Commissioner's box and given him a little chin music. Wait. Perhaps the Commissioner has the power to change the seasons! Perhaps he isn't a brute after all. He is a powerful magician. Yes, I will ask him to keep NYC nice and cool all summer. I will chastise him for making it humid. I need The Very Large Spatula. Where is The Very Large Spatula? Donde es? Regards, Bob - - - - Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2000From: Newhart, Bryson Subject: Writing a waste of time Dear McSweeney's, The sun sinks and rises somewhere else. It so wants to scald us. No one cares. For the man whose leg is missing. Try lost and found. My grandmother, minutes before she died, claimed to see me across the room balanced on one foot. I was in bed, miles from my birthplace, hungover. Too lazy to join my family in going to say goodbye. Loss of love for self and language. Death waits for no one. One feels that about words too. The life they can give. Like the man treading water with a cigarette in his mouth, possibly in his nose and ears. Not my father but he could have been. Between 4 and 40 is nothing I think. It is almost gone already. Here's something. One day around lunchtime I got on the elevator to go pick up a hot denim sandwich. Inside was a man sitting on a portable toilet with his pants around his ankles. He had removed the plastic seat and was wearing it as a necklace. What I needed before: Whale blubber. A hovering ice floe. A ball of yarn. Someone to lick my paper cut. Integrity. A future. What I need now: A human size hampster wheel. A miniature picket fence. 3-D glasses and a periscope. The love of Paul Rinkes. Best wishes, Bryce - - - - Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000From: Shane Wilson Subject: Nothing is useless Dear McSweeney's, I am only 15. Shane Wilson - - - - Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000From: Keith Crouse Dear McSweeney's, Do you remember when pinball was heating up to compete with Space Invaders & I guess Gorf? There was a pinball machine in Ocean City where the ball was an eightball, with giant bumpers, and there were lines around the corner to play this machine. You walked up two steps to play it - Hercules. A muscled hero, toiling among brimstone, serpents, and swooping devils, presiding over your score in dazzling digital orange. To make the line go faster, they'd let two people play one flipper each. Do you remember those really really old old video games like Shark Attack? Instead of deeply complex virtual reality grids, you had but six increasingly gruesome backlit transparencies of a hostile shark being harpooned. It was done with separate lightbulbs, placed gracefully along the course of a fragmented aquatic attack. You tried to influence which picture was lit by knocking the joystick around and screaming. A quarter was worth alot in those days. Reporting from the cultural Paris of my preschool youth, KC - - - - Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000From: Peter Espenshade Subject: lunch Dear McSweeney's, I'm trying to lose weight before I take my new suit into the tailor so I decided to go for a walk at lunch. When I stepped outside I was struck by this really weird smell, sort of like burning plastic dolls. The smell is all over Burlington and everyone is talking about it. I am now in the UVM library trying to recover. I feel a little lightheaded but I don't know if my lightheadedness is caused by the weird smell or if it is just my imagination. My teeth feel funny too. Peter Espenshade - - - - Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000From: Thomas Gibbon Subject: A True Patriot Speaks Dear McSweeney's, Looking back now it seems kind of foolish. How did we ever think that 32,000 schoolbus-sized nuclear warheads could change the world? It was hopelessly idealistic. But, hey, that was the Eighties for you. I remember driving to see Casper about the plan and he just said, "Tom, honest to god, it's all taken care of," cigarette hanging from his mouth, tail of his mullet protruding from the back of his synthetic baseball cap, limbs twitching with his trademark speed tics. Had I still been on speaking terms with his bookie I would have known Casper's key lying phrase "honest to god." As it happened I wasn't so I didn't, so I trusted him. Casper was the first domino to fall. Next Jim bowed out saying there was no way all the pudding would fit, and even if it did those were his favorite pants. And Ronnie got totally into the couple groove with his woman. They were living like on another planet, man. He didn't even come over to watch the finale of "V." Nancy = Yoko. Poindexter was the worst though, at least for me. He drove up about 11:30 one night, just as Custis and I were getting set to watch Carson. "Tom," he says, all agitated, "I think I just killed somebody." I expressed my non-shock and he's all "No, no, someone real, someone here in Great Falls, with my car, just now!" Fuck, he'd lost his nerve. Our driver was out. The man never drove again. That man could really drive, too. I have to admit I even sort of chickened out. I hadn't watched "The Day After" when it was on, you know, media crap, but once things unravelled and I started to get kind of crazy I felt invincible. My uncle had taped it and offered it to me over Thanksgiving, "Show this to your superhero friends at the White House, Tom." I took that as a challenge. I was going to do it. But first I would screen it. I didn't want to show it to the boys unseen. It could've incriminated me. Well, you know how it goes form there. I watched it. It was touching. I lost my shit and checked into the Brattleboro Retreat for a couple of months. Our first strike opportunities waned and waned and by the time Gorbachev came to power it was pretty much game-over for the ol' U.S. of A. The Reds had finally won. Still, you know, sometimes I imagine what it would be like. Me and Ron and Poindexter and Jim and Casper with our hideously mutated giant bodies hurtling through space on a charred and desolate Earth free of Communism. It brings a little tear to my eye. Let no one say we didn't try. Let no one say we didn't care. Let no one say we didn't love. But in the end it turned out we were just some old guys who wanted to kill everybody. And that was our tragic flaw. Viva la Muerte! TGGibbon - - - - Read Previous Letters:
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.