Dear Sir or Madam,

Why weren’t you at my party? Simply everyone in the world was invited. Make no mistake; I am not, nor am I ever, exaggerating. If there’s one thing I take very seriously it’s where-and-whens. I am tired of asking somebody where they are and falling into a tirade about how the hands of fate have battered them. I’m only trying to maintain a tight psychological grip here — but I digress. I sent out six-point-seven billion invitations. Did you not get yours?

I semi-genuinely apologize for the quality of the invitations themselves, if that was what offended you. You see, at the printing company I use, you must provide your own raw materials if your order exceeds one Greek myriad. Considering my order numbered about 665 Indian crores of cardstock, I had to purchase a small forest and decimate it, which was a chore in itself, although naturally I performed no physical labour. I had to bribe the owners of the land with invitations to what I called “an exclusive party,” And if you look at it in the cosmic sense or consider the innumerable species of animal and plant I disenfranchised, it is. I think they were in attendance. I even think they brought quiche. You could have had some.

The invitations were delivered weeks ago by a fleet of postmen, several of whom were trained to read their parcel upon delivery to those who were illiterate and/or rude enough to not understand English. Biplanes sprinkled countries and regions locked by war and water, and those who might distrust an invitation from a white man that did not fall from the heavens. Racism is so boring. It’s so much easier to recognize the only two true races: the miserable and the gullible. You don’t sell yourself short with eye judgments and it’s far easier to understand the breeding.

I really wish you could have come probably. I rented out the entire country of Luxembourg. They were so pleased that someone had heard of them. I understand France and Germany are currently in talks over which of them will absorb the nation’s gutted-out husk now that the festivities have ended. Parts of the event were broadcasted live via satellite to other parts of the event. About two hundred and four bands played. None of them were asked to play but they did anyhow. Nobody complained — except for Garfield McCullough from Edmonton, Alberta. The other Canadians have agreed to start ignoring him. Oh, also, Kenji Ishinabe of Yokohama brought Scattegories and I think someone else brought a cake, which was fairly popular.

There was a strict No Alcohol policy, because I knew that everyone would sneak it in anyway along with probably harder stuff and I wouldn’t have to pay for it. To be sure, a fun time was had by all who could remember it. Your absence has annoyed me, though, and I think I will not be hosting anymore Everyone-On-Earth-Is-Invited parties. They aren’t fair to the courageous astronauts in space, and parties are exponentially more fun when you can exclude people. So, do please come to my next frolic, won’t you? Unless, of course, I decide not to invite you, in which case stay the hell away and assume we are all talking about you.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

P.S.

Soon!

Everyone-On-Earth-Whose-Name-Begins-With-G-Is-Invited!!!

So all you Garys, Günters, and Gungas
grab your green goggles and
get ready to go get gone.

Where: Possibly a town with a Welch or Native American
name that has at least five G’s in it.

When: August. (Only G on the calendar, I’m afraid.)

No, Garfield McCullough from Canada, you’re not invited.
The postman shouldn’t even be bringing you this letter.

Dear Self-Conscious Man Wearing Top Hat,

Yes, people do think you look foolish. I tell you this to preempt you telling me, as you tell everyone in your social circle, including the rabbit you possibly keep under there. You won’t find sympathy here, magic man. If a man wears strange garments, he should expect to get some looks, both of envy and derision; however, you’re wearing a top hat. No one needs to wear a top hat. Social mores may have dictated otherwise at one time or another, but nowadays showing your bare head is not a form of indecency, unless you have hair like Gerard Way, which you probably do, because you wear a top hat.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was, perhaps, a child once. It is a time in my life that I remember fondly, with rushy feelings and necessary stares into the middle distance. Eating a pint of confectioners’ sugar for breakfast, playing with bauxite cubes from father’s factory, befriending a neighbour and extracting their innermost secrets in exchange for pretty lies. The days of innocence and indestructibility, when my responsibilities carried no accountabilities — that is to say, I didn’t have to explain my unrepentance.

One particularly ardent memory from my youth involves an oppressive little shit of a schoolmate of mine called Pyotr. Now, Pyotr was most certainly ‘scum absolutimum,’ as we would say in the Latin-esque kid language we developed, but he was allowed admission to our private school nevertheless, because his father was the custodial captain. It can be inferred that young Pyotr’s unending torment of us stemmed from this overbearing father, who was likely driven at least a little mad from spending every day in a place filled with children whose only motivation for being there is to avoid a job like his.

Pyotr was indeed a terror. He would make inflammatory bids during public auctions and then run out of the room. He practiced his kendo on us during fencing. One time, he contracted eczema purposefully that he might infect the class. To this day I find all hugs suspicious. Action was taken naturally, but there was passivity to my aggression, out of fear for my limbs and torso. It was my intention to addict him to heroin by drugging his milk over a number of weeks, and then use this weakness to control him. Unfortunately, eight other boys had the same notion and Pyotr was dead within three days. His retching, foaming body suddenly lurching onto the cafeteria floor. His feral, often airless screams at invisible demons consuming his flesh as he thrashed himself into oblivion. Having to watch his father clean his corpse up after it was over. ‘Pyotr messygon, pitynon.’ I was, perhaps, a child once. No longer.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

There is something of the underground about the Underground — or subway or tube or T or ‘viol de ver’ or what have you. Normally, I’d rather charter a personal ballooncraft to traverse four blocks than lower myself both figuratively and literally in such a way, but there was an occasion not six weeks ago where I found myself on the rickety stink of public conveyance and in the company of its denizens.

The socialite Henry Bix Binn had purchased a new painting by some young, dead artist to cover a stain on his crepe wallpaper. He confided in me that it was the elbow smudgings of his now-dismissed maid, and I asked if he meant the stain or the painting. Incidentally, this same maid revealed to me that the mark had come from a “Wacky Wallwalker,” Sir Binn’s guilty pleasure it seems. I then made her wealthy as a joke.

Anyhow, I simply had to see this new painting. Henry told me that he intended to faint at its loveliness, but could not without my approval. It was the same as at his wedding. He tantrumed that I must come immediately, and he knows those damn balloonists take ages to rally. Naturally, simply writing the man off was infeasible until the end of the season. Stuck, I swiped the special card we have that makes most things free, and boarded the next local metro ‘Untergrundbahn.’

Dressed in Semi-CasuFormal Style level 3S, I perhaps underestimated the squalorly skin coverings of the unwashed transported masses. A man, whose sleeveless rags bore the name of either his sports team of choice or his mother, pawed at me with his eyes, glossed at my perceived purity. It was as if I was his Christ Jesus or American Idol. He asked me, using all of his teeth, “Can I have eighty-seven dollahs an’ a button?”
“I think not,” was my reply, and I regretted wasting three entire words on the droopsnot, because unfazed, “I only needs twenny fitty to get mah house back and kids,” gabbered next out of his gob.
“If I were to give you one million dollars American,” I began playfully, watching as I literally stretched his mind with the number, “what would you do with it?”
He thought for a time, a curious sight; his grubby fingers played on a crusty hole in his jeans and on a crustier wound in the leg beneath. And then, with an aplomb only the single-minded and destitute can muster, the answer, “I would found a res’rant featurin’ both chicken, acid jazz, and amoral human gamblin’ wit a bright and cullaful atmisfeer an’ some kinda clowndog for da chillens. I knowa guy. Two,” came with the odour of malted liquor and Advil coating.

We went to his lean-to and knocked about concepts over iced coffee and crackpipe. I never did make it to HenBinn’s place, but I’ve been told he’s since sold the painting for eighty-seven dollars and a button — because he has no sense of money whatsoever. As you may have guessed, this is indeed the story of how the chain Gilles Peterson’s House of Wings and Deathsport was founded. We only have a few locations currently, but my associate CaneVein and I prefer that things remain underground for the time being.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

There was a time when I thought that God and I had a special arrangement: I don’t doubt His existence and in exchange He doesn’t exist. I’d believed We’d reached an understanding for I’d lived comfortably in a world of blasé sinning and public agnost for many a year hence and furthermore I believe that if an omnipotent being were to object, They would likely do it in an obvious way. However, as I recently learned, the adage states that He works in mysterious ways, not honest ones.

I was pondering as I took my morning constitutional whether or not I am merely an ordinary mind in a world populated by underachievers and whether or not this line of thinking meant I could add “humble” to my repertoire of excellent qualities, when I came upon a large Gothic structure with people in front. Scores of people, pleasant in dress and demeanor, smiling as if they believed in Life Everlasting or some such privel. Also, they were selling cakes and puddings, so I investigated.

It was not long before it dawned on me that this structure was some kind of franchise temple of worship — for God. Must have sprung up overnight. Thoroughly irate, I cut through a nearby queue, using a Gentlemanly wave of the hand as my passport, and pounded my fists upon the plastic stand at its head dramatically. “Who told you about God??” I thundered to the stout woman behind an array of baked goods. Hesitantly, she pointed to a man in a rather unflattering black frock. “Obviously, this poor transvestite has come to confuse prayer with merely getting on one’s knees,” I surmised.

Before the lady could waggle her crimson jowls in reproach, I snatched one of the mini-cakes off her table and popped it into my mouth. Baked with blind, stinking love and too much butter. Delicious. “I’ll take the lot,” I crumbspat, “Wrap them up.”
“There’s over two hundred cakes and pies here,” she protested, “You couldn’t eat them all.”
“What I’ll do,” I began, using an abstinence pamphlet as a napkin, “Is fill one of my more spacious bathtubs with the confections, rest my nude self among them, engorge until I am full, continue until I am sick, vomit, and then repeat.”
“That’s vile!” she trilled.
“That’s for starters,” I said. “Next I’ll use the remaining sweets as pigment to make extreme, pornographic tableaus on my gallery walls. The remainder shall be lubricant for my next secret public orgy, which might be held in the same gallery. Oh, and also I demand a discount for one of the many reasons I deserve one.”
“OK, that’s like twenty-nine sins,” she sputtered.
“It’s considered improper to count them.”
“Jesus died for your sins, you know.”
“Pity. These cakes are to die for; my sins need not sponsorship.”

And so it went that this fatmongering Goddette went about the task of convincing me not only that He exists, but also that He is very, very cross at me. She went through the whole dance, Pascal’s Wager on down through Rochemsoch’s Robot, and I countered each argument with a mouthful of cynicism and chocolate ganache. Finally, she put her heavy head down on the counter, thoughts leaving her like rats from a sinking ship and croaked, “There must be a God, because you are The Devil.”
“Silly, pious pie woman,” I laughed, “The Devil is a Roman misconstruction of Venus paired with a Hebrew misspelling. I am The Gentleman. I am not a mistake.”

I left unceremoniously with the confections in tow and did exactly as I had said with them — give or take a blasphemy — and now that I think of it, I don’t think I paid a cent. Ah well, fair play to me. Whether or not God truly exists is of little consequence to me. I will carry out my daily business undaddied, thank you. However, to tell the truth I do like the idea that a Superior Being is out there, wherever There may be, steering the Universe with His guiding hand. It keeps me humble.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Ring Pops,

You are not a very good idea for a confectionary novelty. You do not comfortably fit on any but my smallest fingers, which are too sensitive for the gratuitous suckshow you force me to subject them to. Each time I deign to free one of you from your difficult-to-open wrapper, I find myself slobbering inhumanly to lap up the final bits of sugar at the base of the gem, bumping plastic against my incisors and waterfalling a steady stream of syrupped saliva upon my fingers. Also, you have blue raspberry, but not blueberry. I do not like the blue raspberry kind.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

War is, to say the least, a difficult Thing. Sons kiss their mothers goodbye for now or forever — they know not which — and are unable to watch as their countrymen become engorged with jingoism and xenophobia like ripe blueberries, as a certain richness flavours every second of precious life with a kind of fatalistic zeal. It’s not blueberry flavour either, but the flavour of fear, which is an unidentifiable flavour. Like tamarind. Seriously, can someone concisely explain what that tastes like? (No.)

I haven’t myself participated in war, so I am not a Soldier. However, I have legally killed a man, so I do feel a sort of kinship with them. I remember what a young lad — barely eighteen — said to me after a U.S.O. performance in Puhkha, “I like dem titties, brah. And South Park.” Yes, I suppose all of us can relate to the soldier breed. Go forth, marching dogs, forward into war like fresh blueberries into cottage cheese. May you never sour, nor have little retarded stems sticking out of you.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site