Dear sister Lisa, I finished that mystery novel you gave me involving nazi gold in Portugal and murder (A Small Death in Lisbon). Some books are compulsive reads: I couldn't put it down. Now that it is over, I am not sad I read it, but kinda wished I had read something more poetic. It is Spring, after all. the next book I have to read is All of the Names by that guy who wrote Blindness.
Dear workers on college street. I didn't call the municipality last night when you hammered loudly into the night and kept me awake. Let's make a deal: I will wear earplugs if you promise not to pour stinky asphalt this weekend when I set up the bbq in the backyard.
Dear cold or allergies: enough with the phlegm, already.
Dear cat upstairs who I sometimes let into my apartment: Please stop meowing outside the door. I can't let you hang out all the time because you make me sneeze and you eat my palm plant. You also don't seem to want to cuddle, which is completely your prerogative, but you would expect a bit of gratitude for access to our apartment.
Dear people who hang out at my favourite cafe. I don't know what it is, but every time I have a favourite cafe, it gets populated by people who seem to be there all fricking day long, strumming their awful folk music outside and having loud and ill-informed political conversation. I don't know what to tell you, other than I have noted this phenomenon, and have come to observe that while I am a big fan of coffee and watching the street, I might not actually be a cafe person, so to speak.
Dear India, congrats on booting out your fascist gov't. They seemed corrupt and scary with their divisive communalist policies. But with the news we hear these days, it seems as though every government is has a policy of encouraging and organizing violent outbursts, then picking a fall guy.
Dear Ralph Klein: You gave a fairly articulate speech at the Conservative leadership convention this year. And I thought: not bad for a drunken flunkey who bursts into a homeless shelter and tells them to get jobs. But then you not only write a paper on how Pinochet was "forced" to take over Chile because of the detrimental socialist policies of Salvador Allende that the CIA, I mean, the Chileans, did not want. So yeah, you are entitled to your wacked-out fist-thumping views, but then it turns out that large swaths of that paper was plagiarized. I mean, if you are gonna have an offensive point of view, could it least be original?
