Here I Go Again

Paul was her first real boyfriend. Desperate to be in love, he happened to come along at the right place and time, a drunken house-party. They were complete opposites. He was a rocker and she a preppy. She slowly acclimatized and even started to like hanging out in the McDonald’s parking lot blaring Whitesnake from the Camaro. She retired Ralph Lauren for a white leather fringe jacket. She had hoped he was an artist in-the-making but when on her birthday, he wrote her a card that read “Happy Birthday Angle” her spelling elitism got the better of her and it ended.

Inspired by Doxymoron. Illustration by Roberto Atzeni.

From a Letter to Ray in Japan

The last time you wrote, you were about to move into your own place, and you asked me for any tips I might have about bachelorhood. I have none. But I would be interested in hearing about anything you’ve discovered. If you have nothing particularly interesting to share, then tell me something about Japan, since my knowledge is essentially limited to what I’ve learned from Ian Fleming’s books and Saturday morning cartoons.
     I also read somewhere that the Japanese find pubic hair particularly offensive, so I shan’t enclose any with this letter in case it is opened by the authorities.

Inspired by Doxymoron. Excerpted from a letter dated August 24, 1986. Image by the author with assistance from Google Translate, Image Creator, and a font by Norio Kanisawa.

Doxymoron

Shit that I was, I read his love poem to my girlfriends. His suffering filled an entire sheet of lined note paper that he’d ripped from a three-ringed binder. Except for the odd school-neutered valentine, no one had ever written me anything romantic, and really, unless you counted that time in grade four when I made Jim Moran cry, I’d never been considered a dangerous female, worthy of 26 lines of angsty heartbreak. So I thought the work rewarmed and performative and treated it accordingly. In the fullness of time, I learned that he became a writer. A poet, even.

Inspired by Letters from my Mom’s Boyfriends. Image from Pinterest, with additions.

Economics 100

Being an economist is like being an undertaker or proctologist—watch how people avoid you at parties. No one wants to join a spirited discussion about Pareto optimality or the marginal propensity to consume. Father Guido Sarducci once proposed a “Five-Minute University," where students would learn everything they’d remember five years after graduating from a real university. His economics curriculum consisted of three words: Supply and Demand. Really, though, people need more than that to understand economics. I propose a lengthier, in-depth, hundred-word crash course for the MAGA base—crash being the operative word. Imma try with my next post.

Inspired by deluded applications of the dismal science. Part 2 of the program, focused on inequality, is here. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Letters from my Mom’s Boyfriends

I read her love letters from pathetic Arthur asking her about wardrobe advice, not understanding he would always be too embarrassingly unhip for Mom no matter how impressive his single-engine Cessna. I read the short, Franglais letters from Denis when he took that construction job in Algeria—erotic longing seeping through the thin airmail paper. I saw these men only as temporary extensions of Mom. They came and went as others had and were therefore not worth me getting to know. But they were important to Mom and through their words on these pages I glimpse her restless, lonely soul.

Inspired by . . . nothing, I just wanted to change the topic. Image by LambArtist.

Mad Bra!

Maddy worked in Tech Support, but if you were new, and she was in a cheeky mood, she might’ve introduced herself as Mad Bra—her nerdy joke on the way addressing in R-Mail worked, where you could type just a few letters to get to the person you wanted.

     So, Mad Bra gave you Madeline Bradley.

     Rub Sin was Ruby Sinclair. Dam Fog, Damien Fogerty.

     And maybe it’s commonplace now, but back then it seemed nothing short of miraculous, especially if you worked a lot with Glad Jim, better known to her family and friends as Gladys Amalia Jiménez Cárdenas.

Inspired a bit by Instructions, but mostly by a long week of data entry, where I got to dust off this sweet little trick that I learned in the ’90s. Illustration by ChatGPT.