Dear Sir or Madam,

Hand to hand combat is quite vulgar, but at the same time quite romantic. I wish this were a rare paradox, but it happens to be how my high school sweetheart felt about anal. I could never refuse her, thus now no one may use her. What a pity. What a pity. I think that’s original, but someone should have said it first. Bawdy statements are fun, but best secondary said, I say.

Where was I? Oh, yes, of course: fisticuffs. If memory serves me right, I was involved in something of a row whilst involved with this same girl. Another boy had said aloud that the manner with which I held my salad fork in the cafeteria was effete, so, following custom, we were to grapple and scratch at each other over this minor slight to prove our masculinity. I was winning, naturally, but suddenly that same fork found its way into my opponent’s line of sight — when I gouged his eye out with it. “You’re a cheater!” he screamed. “Well you’re fucking blind!” I countered.

“Should it be that hand to eye resolves assault from mouth to ear? Who gives a shit, Reggie; now who’s the queer?” — Anonymous.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

P.S.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Greetums.

Misunderstanding is the joy of shame. Every life is sprinkled with these bite-size undoings, even one as special as my own. It was only the other night that I was walking home, very inebriated. I was swinging my ivory-tipped cane about as a cudgel rather than an ambulatory aid — that by then I desperately needed — when I spied a vagrant sitting in a darkened alley. “Now, there’s a good swip for my swipe!” I thought/said and galloped into an encounter.

To my surprise, what I’d thought was a destitute derelict turned out to be an orphaned sack of monies! Oh, irony does tickle me. Unfortunately, so do homeless people. Still brimming with life’s bacchanalian riches, I continued onward, clutching the sack to my chest protectively. I suppose to outward appearance I was a father cradling a child, because when I gaily tossed the bag off the Elborne Bridge just to hear the sound it made (It was only nickels and dimes anyhow. Who could be bothered?), I was accosted by a young woman, rapt in outrage. Et cetera, et cetera, we had sex. To have a misunderstanding is a jolly thing, but to give the gift of misunderstanding, why, that’s just cake and ale.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Fellow Who Just Text Messaged Me,

Pardon the accusation, but I do not believe that you actually “laughed out loud” at my previous note. All I said was that I intended to be late. Take no humour from this; you are truly not important enough to me to elicit punctuality. Indeed, your choice to spell the word “you” as “u” has only made me think the lesser of you. Oh, and you’d do well to put away your cellular telephone. This letter will take four to six days to arrive.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

I cannot be the only one who has noticed. Let us put the “man” aside from “Gentleman” for a moment. I, like many, am inclined to take exuberant interest in the goings-on of womankind. Their primps and prayers and insecurities and indiscretions and spillings of blood and offspring — I make jolly good sport of Woman, yes. However, as of late it seems that a new kind of lunacy has taken root in the numbers of the fairer sex. And this cancer in the roots has taken its toll upon the once lovely flowers. Undoubtedly a symptom of the times we live in, but has anyone thought to check the state of the moon?

I must show you what I mean. I had been invited to a gathering of some local well-to-do clan, who had found pride in their common surname as a traveler might find stones in his boots. It was the boast of this family that there would be a girl present whom I would surely take to be my bride. An amusing conceit, to say the least, but I had reason to grant them the benefit of a doubt. I knew that at least Meredith, the sister of the acquaintance who had extended the invitation, was comely enough to hazard my bachelorisma on the mystery girl.

As I made my entrance at the event, eyes snapped between myself and an extraordinarily vivacious woman, who was dancing with such confidence that her every footfall was a declaration of ownership. Her face and form hidden amidst ebon locks swirling like God’s paintbrush, “smitten” does not even begin to describe. Immediately, I grasped the scruff of my acquaintance and intoned sweatily, “Introduce me to this vital creature, and I will sing your praises so well at our wedding that you will soon be singing mine at yours.”

I was led across the floor in a trembling gait, fully expecting her gaze to render my soul as transparent as crystal and twice as brittle — a beautiful castle of virtue built in my heart in her name, which was still not known to me, that would shatter in the wake of our love and the sin of our lust. Then, we got a bit closer and I saw that she was a hideous bogfart. I swallowed my fantasy with a grimace and briskly departed without an excuse. Oh! That’s not true, actually. I took pause at the sight of Meredith prattling to her grandfather about lentils of all things, having shaved her head, the dumb twat. Honestly.

Really, though, we cannot blame poor Mer. I choose to blame ol’ flapface for choosing to dance as if she weren’t a fucking flapface! Where I come from (and that’s none of your business, mind you), undesirables are meant to be unobtrusive or, at best, interesting. With all the crones and crunchies taking on the behaviour of the glamourous and attractive, it’s little wonder that the world’s goddesses have gone soft and bought into iPods and soy. So now I implore you, you flopsy mopsy chromosome-dropsy people you, leave sexiness to those worth sexing. Self-esteem is a colour few can wear well, and to make such a mockery of it is just, well, ugly.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

Allow me to tell you about a friend of ours, Frederick Ephraim Geranium Braun. He had three toes, no children, twelve wives. I met him the day he murdered my brother-in-law, and befriended him the day he told me why. This is a man who woke up every day at five in the morning Greenwich Mean Time — no matter where he was on the globe — and ate runny grease and swine for breakfast. He ate that fetid slop and he ate it in the most vile manner imaginable. And you didn’t eat when he ate, but it wasn’t because it was an veritable atrocity. It was out of respect. It is not unlike prayer.

This is a man who dined — in this exact manner, mind you — with three different Popes, though he himself had no sense of piety. He has fought — and valiantly so — in at least four of the United States’ secret wars. His poetry is the most beautiful poetry you will ever read. Poetry which is also elaborate commentary on the subject of evisceration, scripted in natural dyes on enormous slabs of vellum. Skins so vast that it conveys either a mastery of taxidermy or the hidden extinction of a race of behemoths. Either would I believe.

This is a man who is dead now. And to see his prone body with its salty smell and fists lightly clenched, like those of a musician at ready, is to feel the collective sorrow of our species at this loss. Doctors the world over have examined the Corpse and have determined no cause of death. We know the truth, but dare not say it: he has left of his own volition. To die of boredom is a cliché, but to say it would be to call this exodus a mere death. To this day, I think of him in the dead of night when I peer up at the sky, and I fear that the stars are about to go out. “Memories of you I will always keep. You saw God was tired, and put Him to sleep.”

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site