Truthful Tuesday: Snail Mail and My Own Private Idaho

I miss writing letters sometimes. For a while there, I wrote letters quite a bit. No, I wasn't like the people of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, who maintained great and lifelong correspondences. One of my favorite writers, H.P. Lovecraft, wrote letters like moderately attractive people fuck. (Sorry, beautiful people don't fuck all that well. You can't fuck well when you treat every penetration as a charity case. So if you're gorgeous, it's very likely that you're lame in bed. There have actually been studies about this, but I digress).

He wrote letters like a sumbitch, did Lovecraft. Thousands upon thousands of them. Contrast this with you reading this, who have written, at best, dozens. Very likely less than that.

Liar :) Emails don't count, nor do cards with a sentence or two scribbled in them. Paper, pen, stamp, envelope, Dear ______, Love ______, the works.

When I was in 8th grade I was exiled to Idaho by my mom, who had lost control of me. Utterly. My dad, you see, lived in Idaho, where he busied himself with not paying child support and getting married and divorced every couple of years. By 8th grade I had enough height and strength in me to do as I pleased and there wasn't a damn thing Mom could do about it. Not only had I become, quite to my delight, stronger than her, but stronger than the very house I lived in, punching holes in the walls and ripping doors off hinges. She decided I needed a man in my life who would, hopefully, knock the shit out of me. So she got on the phone and basically pleaded for my dad to take me. He didn't want to, but she somehow talked him into it. He did knock the shit out me, too, quite a bit, especially when I wouldn't cut my hair. I wasn't strong enough to do as I pleased, but I was strong enough to take whatever he dished and egg him on for more, snarling at him as he threw me around rooms and whipped me with belts. Practically every time he wasn't looking, I'd run away, and for 6 solid months, which was all he could take, I made his life hell.

It was the least I could do.

The whole time I was there, I wrote letters. My grandmother had slipped me a couple rolls of stamps before I left, along with a 50 dollar bill. "Write us," she commanded, and since she was the matriarch of the family and a veritable queen, I had no choice but to obey. She died just this year, by the way, proving beyond any doubt the existence of heaven.

I wrote Grandma and Mom weekly, sometimes more. I wrote my sister a lot. Dozens of letters, most of which are still in existence. Occasionally, when I'm at Mom's she'll break them out and I'll read them, surprised at how they mention nothing of what was happening in my external reality. Never once did I report an event, mention a person, or talk about anything that was going on in my life at the time. I just rambled, told stories, speculated about shit, cracked jokes, etc. And it wasn't like the whole Idaho experience was a complete nightmare. In school, I had become somewhat popular. I had friends. One, Rusty, I even got pretty close to. One time, we stole his dad's pick-up, skipped school, and drove across the state to Pocatello to see a Van Halen concert. We had a blast. There were girls, too. It wasn't all bad. Hell, I got my first blowjob in Idaho. (Thank you Carra, where ever you might be. Know that you have made me an undying fan of the female mouth and all it's wonders).

I never wrote letters like that again. Times are different. It's 2011, but my head still feels like it's full of magic or at least the mental equivalent of optical illusions. I sing it all on the internet now, on yet another blog, praying to the God I met through Carra that I make enough money to at least buy some beer.

So here I sit, typing into the void.