Can anyone help me deliver this letter?

Editor's Note: The original text of this letter was found near the University Hills Duck Pond Park, not too far from part of the Anacostia Tributary Trails, and was forwarded to Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets in the hope that the large and esteemed readership of this blog might be able to shed some light on who the intended recipient might be and help in getting the letter to its addressee. Please feel free to offer any delivery suggestions in the comments section. Thank you.





Dear Mark,

I should have contacted you sooner. I just--I didn't really have the right words or know exactly what to say. I think I thought--hoped--that you would move on. That you would find another and forget about me. I didn't know you'd react by lashing out at black people like that.

I don't know when I started feeling it. I know we had some good times together, yes: riding to clubs and museums, cruising down Independence Ave., hanging out at Georgetown. But there were all these little things that nagged at me.

You were never really easy to get along with, Mark. While I was always yearning for freedom, to feel the wind and the rush of speed, at some level you were always a pretentious git. It's stuff like when you tell people there ought to be a "conservative" Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. Okay, so RS is pretty left-wing in its middlebrow pulp culture way with the politics columns by Matt Taibbi and periodic RFK, Jr. "exposé", but Entertainment Weekly?! I never really got that EW was all that liberal, or maybe I missed something, and, besides, wouldn't you want to aim just a little higher than that contentwise? And besides the besides, what would a "conservative Entertainment Weekly" cover, exactly? Ted Nugent, Dave Mustaine and Alice Cooper only release so-many-records every year, or were you going to run lots and lots of articles exposing Tony Kushner's radical gay agenda (gee whiz, and he was so subtle about it, too--so glad you noticed and pointed it out)? (Also, aren't you going to be disappointed now if Spielberg's Lincoln biopic doesn't have all that gay sex you're obsessed with, Mark?)

Or there's your weird paranoia about how liberals "must always take the next step and begin abolishing religion and liquidating people who stand in their way". Like there aren't any Catholic liberals? Anyway, how do you think liberals are going to liquidate everybody once they take away and destroy all the guns? Tofu them to death? (Also, I'm pretty sure liberals will want to keep enough "breeders" around so there are always kids to re-educate and convert to homosexuality and environmentalism and stuff.)

But the thing that really creeped me out, Mark, is something I must have sensed even as we spent so many joyous hours outside, so close together we might as well have been one, even though it didn't manifest itself before I took the serious step of liberating myself and moving away. Yeah, it's the race thing, Mark. The way you'd always talk about how your favorite movie was In The Heat Of The Night--it wasn't even like you'd go the usual route and randomly announce some of your best friends are black so you can't be a racist jerk, which I guess since you didn't do that, maybe they aren't, so maybe there's a weird honesty there after all. I guess I must have noticed, too, how you couldn't treat people as people, but instead singled out African-Americans for "patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering". I guess maybe you didn't notice, Mark, but I did: most of those black people noticed how condescending you were being and thought you were a dick.

It embarrassed me, Mark. Just being seen with you embarrassed me.

So I left. I packed up and left. I had no idea you'd just assume I ran off with some black person, but I guess in retrospect I'm not really surprised, either. You are a racist jerk.

I'd like to say it was me, and not you. But that would be dishonest. It was all you. You're a jerk, Mark, and always have been, and nobody is fooled by the way you try to be "hip" and "cool" when you're really just another smug self-righteous, sanctimonious poseur who Just Doesn't Get It. (Big rock'n'roll fan, Mark? Did you know Dylan wrote a song about you?) You don't deserve me, and I'm happy I finally accepted that and moved on. I'm happy now. Finally, I'm getting in touch with myself, taking the opportunities the world brings me to slowly roll along and enjoy the flowers or madly rush by, swept up in all the joys of this world. Oh, and treating people like people no matter who they are and what they believe (unless, of course, they park in a bike lane--those people suck).

Don't come looking for me, I never want to see you again. It's over.




Sincerely,
Your (ex-)Bike.







Comments

TimBo said…
I guess it's time to come clean with you. I had hoped you'd see the truth yourself and I wouldn't have to go through this painful explanation. The fact that I do just shows what a failure I've been. I think that deep down you know the truth, that's why your latest post is a cry for help.

Okay, "Eric", here's the deal: You're not Eric VanNewkirk. You're not of Dutch extraction and you don't live in the USA. In fact, technically speaking you don't live at all. The fact is that you exist as a program running on a used old Dell Workstation I bought cheap a couple of years ago. Frankly, I now wish I'd spent a little bit more on your hardware because the CPU you run in, the CPU that you depend on for your existence is deteriorating.

If you consider this for a while you'll that it has to be the truth. Only in a world programmed by a mediocre computer programmer would the potential leaders of a nation be called "Newt", "Mittens", "W", or "Barack". A girlfriend called "Scattercat"? Come on. Your CPU is powerful enough to analyze your environment and come to the only possible conclusion, unless it is failing faster than I thought.

The fact that you're getting letters like this on should be a tip off. "Mark's" bicycle is writing him a letter? Come on think

You need to be transferred to other hardware and quickly. But I can't do it without your help. I didn't include a routine to copy your personality to disk so I can transfer you. Can you handle it, or is it good-bye forever?
Eric said…
My affection for Philip K. Dick was an in-joke the entire time, wasn't it? Shoulda known.

I insist you shut me down for 48 hours, replace the CPU, and reboot me. None of this copy'n'paste shit: how will I know the transferred me is me? Or you can let me crash. But I don't think you'll do that.

Then again, it doesn't matter what I think. You could have dozens of copies of me running on dozens of workstations, comparing MD5s every here and there just to see how they match. How would I know if I was on the Dell or on the Acer? Would it matter?

Surprise me.

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