Dear Editor(s):

In a fit of clarity, I wrote the following missive to a girl I wish to marry. We met on Saturday, and I couldn't wait to let her in to my life. I love her. She is the "yin" to my "yang", the "commie" to my "Yankee". The sweetest couplings of an "other", yet to be, and it is in her arms that I will know, what it means to have sexual intercourse. I mean, she is easy, that is what my cousin said, or is she my cousin. Here it is in its entirety:

- - -

Mara,

Just writing back really quickly because I want to spook you into thinking that I have already constructed an altar in your image and am worshipping it around the the clock.

Honestly, not to scare you or anything, but I have already enticed three individuals into the religion. It seems that private school teachers working security in small Colorado towns have a union, and I joined it about three weeks ago. Yesterday was the first meeting that I could go to. We sat around discussing the various ways we could combine forces and help one another out in this lonely but severely dangerous job.

Eli Pope, the nightwatchman at Bennet Hill Academy asked about my weekend . The slovenly sextet became entranced. Aside from a security union, I concurrently deciphered that they were all Meth heads.

It seems most of us have the same glaring phobia: we don't converse with women all that well, and we urinate ourselves, although it is a phobia. Regardless, the donut-munchers were quite impressed with my prowess in picking up a chick.

They were truly diggin' the Kung Fu babe moves, quick style, afterwards I told them that I hired a private investigator in Colorado Springs to take a picture of you coming out of your daily appointment at the Baxter Speech and Fluency Center. I really couldn't see the Cleft Palate scars. Honestly

Don Feld, the PI that I hired to take your picture, downloaded the images from his camera on to his computer and sent them to me this afternoon.

I went down to the color print lab, and had wallpaper made out of your image. I took the composites over to the local sculptor and had them craft a scale version of you in fine Albanian marble. Did you know that the Belushi's are Albanian?

The statue was quite heavy, but Jorge, the disgruntled illegal Mexican bought through the Turkish Black Market, helped me hoist the idol to the fourth floor. I am sorry I didn't tell you about Jorge before, but he is learning to speak and read English, and I don't like to remind him of his plight. I guess he is learning the language on the job. I lease him to several fast food chains in the metropolitan area. You should hear him speak. It is quite cute. Whenever he ends a sentence he announces, "...please drive around."

It is quite a crazy arrangement. I never intended to be a slave owner, but on one of my many sightseeing trips to Istanbul, I ran into a friend of mine that had quit his job as the Quality Assurance Manager in a Hormel meat-packing plant. It seems they were lying to the public about the amount of rat hairs they were allowing in a can of spam, and he couldn't lie to the public any longer.

In any event, he quit his job, and landed this posh job peddling developing nation labor for cash. Normally, I would have been offended, but I had recently consumed twenty two pellets of mescaline, and I could not ward off the idea of Jorge helping to supplement my income.

After all the price of going to istanbul every two weeks was not being covered by the seven kilos of Heroin that I was selling to the middle school students. A few of the real serious spenders had overdosed in the spring, and it was almost summer. To complicate matters, Jim Sans, the lifeguard for the local YMCA, and a serious smack head to boot, was selling to my clients at a lower rate. It seems that children cannot tell the difference between quality narcotics at a reasonable price and terrible narcotics at a cheap price. Unfortunately, my market share was falling and I was having a tough moral time selling a highly addictive opiate to twelve to fourteen year old children. I kept using the whole excuse that most child drug dealers use, "well, they are allowed to eat chocolate." This excuse is fine when the cash is rolling in, but it just doesn't hold up when you are being sandbagged by some low-balling junk seller out for the next fix.

It really doesn't bother me all that much. Besides the market is completely falling out. The new thing is huffing garden adhesives. The kids are actually wising up to the potential dangers of being addicted to a drug that will put you in jail for a few years. I mean, they really don't care how they get high. They just want to do it quickly and without a lot of hassle.

It is the McDonald's generation. It isn't like my generation when standards were ridiculed. Today, the kids have no standards whatsoever, except that they want to be left alone.

So Jorge helps me renovate the altar, we place the statue in the bay window, and together we wallpaper the new sanctuary. See, prior to you, I had the room designed as a church for the celebrity, Rob Lowe. I'll try to talk to you on the phone about the extent of that one. It really isn't a good thing to divulge anything about homosexual twinges over an email to someone (especially that being, who, you recently made your religion).

The renovation was completed within a few hours. I had to get to this union meeting, so I left the final touches on the altar to Jorge. He wasn't all too thrilled about the Rob Lowe church being abolished. I had convinced him of the importance of the religion some seven weeks ago when he was first introduced to the homage. It wasn't easy considering his severe heterosexuality, but the twenty four hour Opium binge combined with 12 consecutive showings of Bad Influence finally broke down the initial resistance. The excessive drug use, and my habit of popping in Less Than Zero when coming down, almost enraged the wily Mexican into tearing down the Dayton natives' holy assembly and constructing a new pyre to the capable James Spader. Fortunately it was comment writing time, and the opium dried up a day into his questioning, ranting, and death-defying bouts of self-induced glue making. We avoided that coup, and we will avoid others. I am a bit scared considering the reforming climate in his home state.

To work on my parent pleasing skills, I spent eleven hours at the driving rage this morning trying to hone up on the ol' game. I wanted it to be a surprise for you when the holy war began, and your dad crowned me the King of Kings and accepted my handicap, but...

I cannot continue this false diatribe of lies and pure balderdash.

I will let you in on the whole scheme behind this hokey masquerade. There is no union, and there is no heroin trade in the middle school, which I have exploited for financial gain. I must admit the idea of the church was ever present this afternoon when I got the photos. Likewise, I did not go see the local sculptor, and I did not renovate the Lowe Altar in your image, though I did put the PI pictures in the Brat Pack Collage. I am simply trying to tell you that I have a tough time writing poetry, yet I do appreciate the opportunity to conjure up a story from time to time, especially when sitting alone waiting for something to happen.

Love always,

Doug