Dear Jeweler

I am sorry to have interrupted you as you were intently reading the newspaper in your shop.  However, since the newspaper in our town is routinely around three pages long, including the comics, I thought perhaps you could spare a few minutes to help me.  Obviously Tank McNamara was a little too cerebral for you on this day, because after a full minute you still wouldn't acknowledge that I had walked into the store and was in fact standing in front of you.  Normally, I would have walked out then and there, but I needed help. 

So, I took my watch off and set it on the counter right next to your paper, and asked you how much it would cost to take a link out of the band.  You, being the classy, pale, mouth breathing, balding gray-hair-in-ponytail dreamboat that you are, responded by telling me to come back after 6PM the next day.  Seeing as it was 2PM, and the shop hours posted behind you indicated that you close at 7PM, I feel I was justified in asking if perhaps you could do it today.  I think that might be a fair assumption that you had the time to do it, since there were no other customers, you were reading a newspaper, and you couldn't touch yourself while watching Judge Judy until it came on at 4PM. 

You then told me that it is very easy to fix, and I could look up how to do it myself on the company's website, thereby contradicting my assumption that your only understanding on the internet was that it is a wicked sex box.  In fact, you told me it was so easy it could be done in five minutes.  I explained I had followed a tutorial online, but didn't have the correct tools.  You reiterated that you couldn't do it until tomorrow, and it would cost around $20.  When I pointed out that you had just told me that it would only take five minutes, you grunted and went back to your paper.

I bought the tools online for five bucks, with free shipping.  You are lucky I have a job, otherwise I would set up a little stand outside your jewelry store where I would offer to fix people's watch bands for $18.99, same day.  You would lose all of your business, and then how would you ever be able to buy pretty hairbands to hold your ponytail in place?

Dear Lady at the Cafeteria

Our table of ten people for dinner might have been loud in a regular restaurant.  In a room called "The Great Hall", where there were at least 400 people eating, I could barely hear other people at the other end of our table.  We were in the back corner of the dining room.  The table behind us were couples with children, and the table beside ours was you and your friends.  I am not sure what exactly my friends and I were discussing, but I am fairly confident it wasn't as bad as things we could have been discussing.  What I do know is that a lady at your table tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a slip of paper, telling me she had been asked to give our table this note:

Really?  What did we do that was so awful?  If we were using inappropriate language, I am fairly certain that the table with children that was physically closer to us would have said something.  We certainly didn't bring any animals into the building, but it seems like you rode in on a very high horse. 


If you are going to "anonymously" give us the note because you are too cowardly to do more than antagonize from afar, don't leave the notepad and pen in front of you.  It makes it fairly obvious who wrote this.  Had you bothered to simply come over and let us know that you were unhappy with us, and why, perhaps we could have had a little discourse on the matter and come to a happy conclusion on the matter.  You had to go middle school on us, and you are lucky that we did not follow suit.


No, the table of 28-32 year olds decided to act more maturely than the table of 60-70 year olds.  We didn't mouth things at you, and we didn't pass little derogatory mash notes to you.  Instead, the table handed me the note, knowing that I would do exactly this.

You are making a judgement call that the content of our conversation is "rude, crude, and socially unacceptable."  I am very sorry, but I am not concerned at all what your opinion is on that matter.  You didn't bother to consult me before you put on the striped muumuu you are clearly not pulling off, so I will not consult you on this.  You had no business listening to us in the first place.  You really must have been listening hard, because I could hear nothing from any other table other than the loud din of hundreds of people talking in a big room.  Yet somehow, you could hear what we was saying from thirty feet away, because you stared us down and started mouthing the words "Shut up" to a woman at our table.  That is pretty funny, because my mother always taught me that it is not nice to tell someone to shut up.  In fact it might seem CRUDE.


My lovely dining companion Andrea, an apparently rude, crude, and socially unacceptable librarian, pointed out to me that Miss Manners, a respected authority on what is socially acceptable says that it is RUDE to correct a stranger.  This is because you may have taken things out of context, and also because you have absolutely no right to govern the actions of others.  Doing something like that might not be ACCEPTABLE in SOCIAL situations.

So, next time you have your muumuu bunched up in a tiff, please take another sip of the large margarita you have in front of you.  I will have a sip of my diet coke, and we will all chill the hell out.  After all, we came here to have a good time.  Didn't you?

Dear Mockingbird

You are the Guy Fieri of birds.  You scream outside my window all night long, and you don't even scream in your own voice. You spend all your time trying to imitate something you are not.  If you were to get some awful frosted tips, slap on some sweatbands, and interject some stupid made up words like "Flabberty BOOMTASTIC" between pretending to sound like a robin and screeching like Bobcat Goldthwait passing a kidney stone, TGI Fridays might have you try to hock some Buffalo Chicken Poppers.

Why don't you ever sleep?  That's what I want to do, and you make it so very hard.  The only other thing I know that sits in the dark and sings to itself is Fred Durst.  Do you want to be Fred Durst?  Even Fred Durst does not want to be Fred Durst.  To make it worse, if you aren't outside my window all night, you are standing on the top of my chimney all day.  My chair is right next to the fireplace, and the chimney is generally just a big megaphone to channel the awfulness that is you.

It got so bad I went on the internet to try to find out how to get rid of you peacefully.  There are no viable options for that, so I looked for more drastic measure.  I spent all afternoon reading what I thought was a how-to book for dispatching your annoying ass, but it turned out it was just some beloved book about racism and the nobility of man.  I did almost hit you with the book though, but I missed and now I have a book stuck on my roof.  

Please enjoy the bowl of uncooked rice, alka seltzer, and pop rocks I left for you on the deck.  I have also filled up the bird bath with some nice cold water that was blessed by an old priest and a young priest.  Hopefully it makes you burst into flames.

Dear Woman Who Stepped in a Mudpuddle

You were out jogging.  This usually takes place out in nature.  Nature is where birds poop everywhere, bees have sex with the birds, and the all powerful Snarly Yowl lords over all of creation.  You should understand that there are certain elements involved in this activity, seeing as you bought a fancy pair of sneakers specifically for this pursuit.  Just because you are running on a golf course, this does not suddenly make nature go away.  The course is not AstroTurf, and the bunkers are not filled with cotton candy.  Also, it is not a running course.  There are people hitting hard little projectiles at high speeds, and usually with little to no control over the trajectory.  Now that we've come to that understanding, you can understand why the pro shop attendant and I looked so confused to see you hopping on one foot into the pro shop, holding a muddy shoe in one hand.

It seems your eyes were momentarily taken off the prize as you were training to be the most tan and closest to 70 lb soccer mom at your kid's school's bake sale next month.  Apparently you stepped right into a mud puddle not fifteen feet from the pro shop.  I know this because you all but dragged the attendant outside to show him the puddle.  I, of course, followed because, well, who wouldn't.    The attendant did not give in to your hysteria, and simply asked you what you would like him to do.  You are smarter than both of us, because you were the only one of us that knew that it was the golf course's fault for having a mud puddle, and not your fault for stepping in the one hazard with 100 square yards.  You insisted that he launder your shoe, because of the injustice visited upon you.

I don't even want to think why you thought that a country club would have the facilities to launder a shoe, or why you would in fact trust them to do so.  I don't want to think about why you assume that you are owed this either.  Frankly, you made my brain hurt, and I was forced to simply proclaim loudly that the world no longer makes any sense, and then try to make you bleed from the eyes with my poor injured brain.

Dear Casual Acquaintances on Facebook

Maybe we were classmates, drinking buddies, or we met through other friends.  We haven't talked in a very long time, but I knew you well enough to accept your friend request.  If I was the one that sent the friend request, most likely it was because I like you and wanted to keep in touch, or I disliked you enough to want to keep tabs on you.  Regardless of the reason we are Facebook friends, we are most likely not great friends in real life.  For that reason, I just need one thing from you: please don't make me feel worse about myself.

I realize that I have gotten to the age where my peers are getting married, having kids, buying houses, and getting high paying jobs.  I also realize that to a degree it is my fault that I am living in a state of semi stunted maturity.  Maybe that is why I feel so bad off.  If I were living in some Maxim magazine, high-school/college was the best time of my life, sleeping with a different woman every weekend after getting drunk while I rage against the dying of my 20's, I could be happy.  Maybe I would be happy if I had achieved more than just a couple socially accepted milestones that I should have passed at this point in my life.  I am somewhere in between these two choices, which means I sit around and constantly question my life choices.

Seeing that the woman I met a few times through some high school friends has just had her third kid, or that the guy that used to sell pot on my hall freshman year of college has his doctorate and has really gotten his life together does not make me feel like I have won the Good Life Sweepstakes.  The high point of my week was having a good sandwich and then treating myself to a cigar after watching the Phillies game.  That's how low my expectations have become.  If something extraordinarily fun and entertaining were to come around, I might have to stab myself in the leg just to bring some balance to the jubilation I feel. 

Maybe, before you post pictures of your happy and productive lives, you should think about how those pictures are going to affect that big guy you met at that party a few years back.  You know, the one who posts those angry things all the time.  It might seem like you are rubbing it in, just how good things turned out for you. Viewed through that lens, it would seem like you are a real jerk for posting stuff like that, wouldn't it?  That'd be like going to a  hospital and rubbing it in that you have properly functioning organs.

Do you feel good about yourself now?

Dear Parents in Trader Joe's

If you can bring your kids to the store, I can get drunk and bring in a flail.  That way I can be just as loud and destructive as they are.  Unfortunately for me, I will be held accountable for my actions while you and your kids learn absolutely no lessons.

In the ten minutes I spent in the store, I had no less than three kids run into me/push a shopping cart into my legs.  I also saw two little boys running around the aisles playing tag while their mother laughed at how cute they were being.  This is not a large store, and it was a Sunday afternoon.  There are too many people for you to let you children act like little speed freaks.  No amounts of laser death stares or growling makes little health food store kids stop acting stupid.  I think the lack of additives has crippled the fear centers of their brains.  I have no excuse for why you are terrible parents.

I will give a very large amount of credit to the staff of the Annapolis, MD Trader Joe's.  With every screaming temper tantrum, every knocked over display case, and every demand for more free samples of juice from the pint sized terrorists, the staff simply smiled and went about their business.  They never gave you idiot parents a withering glance, or stopped smiling while they restacked boxes.

The worst part of this trip came right before I left.  A man, probably in his sixties, was unloading his cart at the checkout.  An unsupervised urchin ran directly into the man's cart as he was lifting out a glass bottle of juice.  The cart hit his hand, and the juice was dropped and smashed on the floor.  The child began bawling, standing in a puddle of juice, in the way of letting the man out from behind where his cart has pinned him to the counter.  Of course, the mother suddenly appears, and seemed ready to blame the man for upsetting her child.  She sat around coddling the child, telling him that everything was fine and it wasn't his fault while the man had to get more juice, and the poor smiling checkout girl picked up glass and mopped the floor.

This was you child's fault.  To tell him it wasn't is wrong is to teach him his actions have no consequences, and he can act however he wants.  It reinforces that you never have to pay attention to what your child is doing, and that you are a great parent because your lies made your kid stop screaming and crying. Tell the kid that every time a kid breaks something that isn't his, a Muppet gets set ablaze.  Let him know that whenever a kid acts up, a kitten is banished to a dark nether realm where it is forced to watch The View nonstop until it collapses.

I wish the checkout girl Tabitha would have charged you for the broken bottle, and I wish she would have put you in your place in front of everyone.  Some people are too nice though.  More likely though, she knew that she wouldn't be as lucky as you, and she wouldn't get away with anything. She was a sweetheart, and doesn't deserve the headache you gave her.

Dear Captain Morgan's Gold

I can recall sitting in a suite in college, for once not using the television to play 007 Nightfire.  We were all sitting around watching something or other, when the glory of your commercial aired for the first time.  Your gruff and demanding announcer, with backup singers, announced the tired days of getting drunk off of beer, liquor and diluted varnish were over.  Captain Morgan's had ventured into the land of malt beverages.  Finally, someone had made a manly Zima. 

Your commercial had everything: women in short shorts, big blazing balls of fire, and a sly humor not known those days and not to be seen again until the Vault soda commercials, or Old Spice Guy.  After a vicious Battle Royale fight for shotgun, and a harrowing high speed car ride through Southern Maryland, we each had a shiny 24 pack to consume.  Certainly we could have just gotten one pack and shared, so that we could give you a try.  That's exactly the kind a thing that complete idiots would do when faced with a 24 pack of malt goodness for the mere price of $8.99.  They would settle for only a little bit.  My friend and I are not idiots, Herr Captain, so get that thought out of your mind.

The first few sips were not pleasant.  The gentle citrus aftertaste you promised was more like a frothy mechanical discharge from a syphilitic robot.  Sipping was clearly no longer an option.  We frantically drank our bottles with the panicked fear of college students that finally understand that they may not be invincible; that perhaps there are things of pure evil in this world, and that they might possibly be sloshing around in our stomachs like cheap liquid demon babies. 

My compatriots gave up after the third or fourth bottle, content on relegating the hateful remains of their cases to the trash, or simply waiting to drink the rest when they were already too drunk to feel the loathing for humanity that emanated from the wicked brew.  I, as always, was too smart to follow the crowd.  The way I saw it, after the sixth chugged bottle, my stomach and brain were quickly creating an antidote.  Already I could feel immunity to the poisons building in my system.  I championed on, determined to finish all 24 bottles and raise a resounding victory for Good and Justice.

The only things I remember about what came to pass after drinking that case was wrestling my friend Jesse on the grassy commons until we were both fairly hurt.  I then somehow got my hands on a Styrofoam airplane and started frolicking about, trying to make it fly.  That is all I remember.

I know this was not the night I accidentally urinated on a duck, and it was not the night I fell in the pond.  I know because people remembered me doing these things, and told me about them.  No one, however, remembers what happened the rest of that fateful day.  I can take an educated guess, though.

You roofied us, and stole our innocence that day, Captain Morgan.  Shame on me for expecting more from a company who uses a bloodthirsty rapemonster for a spokesman.