Dear Man I Have Not Met

I've written love letters and e-mails to married men. This offense, a fairly egregious one, didn't yield me a fun frolic or nights of wondering will he call, will he leave his wife? No, dear readers, these were notes for various friends who were in love with married or otherwise unavailable men that I helped craft -- perhaps one of the weirder ghostwriting gigs around. Dear Man I Have Not Met . . Because you almost never meet the married ones. The secrecy of an affair seldom allows such public events and when it does either the man in question is so late that you're blasted out of your mind at some dive bar with your increasingly anxious friend as a result of having four or five tiny little drinks to take the edge off -- but more likely than not, the married dude will make the I Can't Get Away Call. Your friend sighs and you say, It's not a big deal, there will be plenty of other times, both of you knowing deep down that there won't, and yes, we'll have another round and maybe some buffalo wings because who cares about looking good now that everything has gone to shit and all the make-up your friend has spent the night applying starts to smear as she goes into a thousand yard stare, watching the people at the bar, the ones ranging from buzzed to ass-out drunk and she begins to cry because her friends can't even meet her boyfriend because of that bitch of a wife of his without it being a big fucking production. Not that I've ever experienced this before . . .

So the notes I have written are all a little on the generic side given that I don't know my audience. But I haven't had to write such a note in a long time. I imagine that the wide variety of greeting cards now available might have this area covered. I was heartened to see a divorce card with Snoopy on it, trying to rewind a VCR to get rid of the bad parts of life. So I'm out of a job! And thank God -- I don't know how to text message. I don't know what I'd do with even less words with which to work.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Those people who have confidence to eat from each other's cooking pots can count on each other in times of trouble. This is the definition of family: people on whom one can depend. Yet this group can never be taken for granted whether blood relatives or fictive kin." Donald Cosetino, A History of Voudoo

Cocktail Hour

Drinking music suggestion: For Lovers Only Southern Culture on the Skids

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Tuesday!

55 Days until The Sopranos airs!