Alphabet Soup 

Call me a luddite, but I still write letters. I’ll put a pen to a paper and go at it like Picasso. You wouldn’t believe the dirty things that I put in my letters – adjectives and nouns, even an exclamation point if I’m really feeling rowdy. It is a whole method of visual communication, and no one seems to give a damn about it anymore. It’s been shelved in the back room next to the smoke signals and morse code. We just don’t have time for it anymore, we all say. It’s just too much darn work. Idiot, I say to you. Now there’s a five-letter word. Feel free to use it if you ever find yourself in front of a mirror. Cause that’s what we all are for allowing the letter to be postmarked and sent into obscurity.

I can prove to you right now, that letters are good for you like alphabet soup, and that you know it too. You wanna know how? Check your mailbox. What do you see? Bills, a campaign ad, 20% off coupons. If you’re lucky, there’s a twig. Now imagine in that pile, you also got a letter. Doesn’t matter who it’s from. Maybe it’s your aunt, or your friend in Brazil, or the woman at the fragrance counter who’s always batting eyes at you. Aren’t you the least bit more excited? Don’t you wanna know what they have to say? What has compelled them to draw shapes on a rectangle with an oval-shaped squid? And wouldn’t you be grateful too? It could be your arch-nemesis from high school writing to bad mouth you one more time from his death bed. Wouldn’t you at least take it a little bit to heart that he went through all the trouble of insulting you by hand? I say you would. And that’s the problem of it all. Dang it, letters just make us happy. They turn a dirty old mailbox into a telephone to the world. And we want to deprive people of that wonder because we are all too lazy of doing it ourselves. We can’t undo the mistakes we make when writing with a pen. Because humans are supposed to be perfect. Isn’t that right?

I met a perfect person once. He did all the right things, said all the right things, and I realized how pathetic I must look standing next to such a pristine human being. So I killed him - nailed him to a cross and buried him in a cave – and I’ve learned to love the things that make the rest of us imperfect. So spill a little ink, spell a word wrong, accidentally call your sister a moose on purpose. But when all’s said and done, and you’ve made a complete mess on that blank slate of papyrus, I want you to put that piece of paper in an envelope, stick a stamp on one of the corners -doesn’t matter which – and let that birdie fly.