A letter to Rod

Rod:

There’s a good chance someone’s burning pigeon feathers at the elementary school. I walk by daily and there’s the bad smell, but no sign of anything that it would steam from, and there’s always a guy spraying the sidewalks. I wonder how does one get a job like that: to spray sidewalks with a hose… So anyway, I figure if I were burning pigeon feathers en masse, where better than inside an elementary school. I imagine a mustachioed man with large eyes doing this. And that would explain the smell. Terrible. Like the Wendy’s chimney or a post-coital French fry enthusiast who sweats through his stomach lining.

My lives are merging. I keep my ties in a K-Swiss box. I have one shelf. I still sit in chairs like a bird might. Something Mexican is hanging on my wall: It’s not a person, and I don’t even know how to spell it. Occasionally I think of buying a hanging plant to put on the hook on my ceiling, but I figure it would develop several addictions, at least one of which would be breathing, and I prefer I be the only alive thing in my room—it gives me a sense of superiority. Otherwise, what’ve I got on my light switch? Ad majorem Dei gloriam, I putty tack holes.

I was glad to hear of your travels in Ann Arbor, that you ate your fill, that you woke up dry, albeit waxen. It’s a bright pasture, that place, with happy, wobbly ponies. I may visit sometime soon and exhale some coltish exhalations. Pass out in a flower bed. Get stung by disillusioned bees.

Until then, though, I’ll stare around this room—in which the most interestingly shaped thing is the musky red bullet of deodorant stick—and I’ll wait for another shift in the weather. That way I’ll know what to talk about when the world lifts a biscuit above its head and says speak. I can say, did you see those clouds? And it can say, no, I am them. And I can say, oh man, you should’ve seen them, they were fast. Then the world will give me the biscuit and I’ll eat it except for a few crumbs, which I might get bronzed for my shelf or roll up in snowballs to throw at a girl I like.

In lieu of proper batteries,
Dave