Going out. (Letter 29)

I still have not heard from [adult swim]. Today marked the first full week since they should have received my package. They've had it for a week. That means they actually have the address to this blog. Yipes! That means they can see that I have slacked off on posting my letters. Oh well.

I recon they will pass my wonderful stories around and laugh. They will listen to some really cutting edge underground college music and then years down the road, whether I wind up working for them or not, they will hear that music again and think fondly of me. But who am I kidding, I'm gonna work for them. They cannot say no to the man who could do what I've done. I'm the man.

Actually, I'm not the man. I'm just the best man. There are lessers. (Being with me is like riding a roller coaster of confidence).

So anyway, Friday night the Mrs. and I went to Buckhead for a drinking fund raiser. I don't know what we were raising money for. We went to a club called CJs. It's not bad for an open air dive. They actually serve beer from a tap that says, "Cheep Shit." If you go there, and you are the designated drive, as I was, do NOT get ice water. Go without. No matter how hot. The water was nasty.

When you were a child did you ever eat snow off of a car? If you did, did you notice that it had a metally taste? It tasted distinctly different from snow on the ground (which you should avoid eating for entirely different reasons). Well, this metally taste came from dirt. And not just regular dirt, but from road dirt. As you drive down the road the cars in front of you are kicking up nasty dirt from the road and tiny particles of it are sticking to your car. It's road tar, roak kill, dog poo, gasoline, dirt, drugs, cosmic bananas and just about anything else you can run over. So when it snows that snow settles in on your dirty car and the dirt clings to the snowy snow. And when you go outside to play and pick up a big handful of snow from the trunk of the car and eat it you are really eating frozen ice with all the road dirt you can imagine mixed in. That is where that nasty, dirty, metally taste comes from.

That is what CJ's water tasted like. Not similar to that, but exactly like that. Had I been drinking I probably would have dismissed it as drunken misunderstanding, but sadly I was sober.

I was also sad to be sober because there was live music. The musician was actually not that bad, though he only played covers. It was sad because it made me realize how long it had been since I got up in front of people and played. I love to play and sing for people.

While we were listening to this guy play, who incidentally was one guy, though he called himself a band name, like the Red Tide, or something, my sister asked if I thought he was good enough to tip. I said sure, but he wasn't good enough to have a whole band name to himself. It made me wonder what his name could possibly be; Peter Beavers, or Trevor Slapsmackpunch, or Carl Killspuppies. It must have been bad to prefer Red Tide. Anyway, I told my sister, yes, he is good enough. She didn't really need my help to decide. It was more of a gesture to me, as if she was acknowledging that I too am a musician.

I would have told her yes even if he had sucked. It is hard to get up there and play for people who don't care that you are there. It is tough to remain super cool and confident when your best lines are lost to the din of frat boys burping, waitresses lying about how long they've been working while they try their hardest to fall out of their shirts, and about 2000 extra pounds in the room shimmies and vibrates and stresses out the building foundation. After she tipped him she asked me if, as a guy, I preferred it when women tip me or men. I told her it all depended on how hot the man was.

LETTER 29:

Dear [adult swim],

When I was eight years old I missed baseball tryouts at Murphey Candler. the league said if I wanted to play I'd have to be thrown in with the seven year olds. At first I was disappointed, until I realized that I could run circles around those little punks. Well, most of them. Some of those kids were on steroids. They had to have been. The pitcher for our team could throw a 55 mile an hour fast ball. he was only seven.

The cops were completely uninterested when I anonymously tipped them off that my teammates were juicing. They said just because I sucked was no reason to get other kids in trouble. But that kid was amped all of the time and his chin was twice as wide as his head. He looked like Rick Flair. Well, he looked back then like Rick Flair looks now. Back then Rick just looked like he took SOME steroids.

Last night I was reading Shel Silverstine poems to my daughter. I complained that she wasn't laughing at any of them and by the sixth or seventh poem she was fake laughing to please me. What surprised me most was how convincing she was. Then I thought back on all of those jokes I'd told her mother over the years. All those times I was so "intellecutally funny," and "too clever to actually laugh at."

signed

Here is where I drew a somewhat decent picture of three steroid using seven year old baseball players.