Don’t not take a psychotropic on my account.
FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com
SUBJECT: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
Nice try, but no, sorry, I insist that you come for Christmas.
I’ve been talking to Axon, and the plan is to give Dad six months of Corecktall beginning right after New Year’s, and to let him and Mom stay with me while that’s going on. (Helpfully, my life is in ruins, so it’s easy to make myself available.) The only way this scenario won’t happen is if Axon’s medical staff decides that Dad has non-drug-related dementia. He admittedly seemed pretty shaky when he was in New York, but he’s been sounding good on the phone. “All I hurt when I fell was my dignity,” etc. They took the cast off his arm a week early.
Anyway, he’s probably going to be with me in Philly for his birthday, and for the rest of the winter and spring too, and so Christmas is the time for you to come to St. Jude, and so please don’t argue with me anymore, just do it.
I eagerly (but with confidence) await confirmation that you will be there.
P.S. Caroline, Aaron, and Caleb are not coming. Gary’s coming with Jonah and flying back to Philly at noon on the 25th.
P.P.S. Don’t worry, I say NO to drugs.
FROM: exprof@gaddisfly.com
SUBJECT: Re: “The only thing I hurt was my dignity”
I saw a man shot six times in the stomach last night. A paid hit in a club called Musmiryte. It had nothing to do with us, but I wasn’t happy to see it.
It’s not clear to me why I’m required to come to St. Jude on some specific date. If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hardwired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents.
Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don’t think they want to hear what I do have to say.
Why don’t I plan to see them when they’re in Philadelphia? That sounds more fun anyway. That way all nine of us can get together, instead of just six of us.
FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com
SUBJECT: A serious flaming from your pissed-off sister
My god you sound self-pitying.
I’m saying come for MY sake. For MY sake. And also for YOUR OWN sake, because I’m sure it’s very cool and interesting and adult-feeling to watch somebody get shot in the stomach, but you only have two parents, and if you miss your time with them now you won’t get another chance.
I’ll admit it: I’m a mess.
I will tell you — because I want to tell someone — even though you never told me why YOU got fired — that I was fired for sleeping with my boss’s wife.
So, what do you think *I* have to say to “these people”? What do you think my little Sunday chats with Mom are like these days?
You owe me $20,500. How’s THAT for a debt?
Buy the fucking ticket. I’ll reimburse you.
I love you and I miss you. Don’t ask me why.
FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com
SUBJECT: Remorse
I’m sorry I flamed you. The last line is the only one I meant. I don’t have the right temperament for e-mail. Please write back. Please come for Christmas.
FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com
SUBJECT: Worry
Please, please, please don’t talk about people getting shot and then do the silence thing to me.
FROM: Denise3@cheapnet.com
SUBJECT: Only six more shopping days before Christmas!
Chip? Are you there? Please write or call.
VILNIUS, OCTOBER 30. With world ocean levels rising by more than an inch per year and millions of cubic meters of ocean beach eroded daily, the European Council on Natural Resources this week warned that Europe could face “catastrophic” shortages of sand and gravel by the end of the decade.
“Throughout history, mankind has regarded sand and gravel as inexhaustible resources,” said ECNR chairman Jacques Dormand. “Sadly, our overreliance on greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels will leave many central European countries, including Germany, at the mercy of sand-and-gravel cartel states, particularly sand-rich Lithuania, if they wish to continue with basic road-building and construction.”
Gitanas R. Misevičius, founder and CEO of Lithuania’s Free Market Party Company, compared the impending European sand-and-gravel crisis to the oil crisis of 1973. “Back then,” Misevičius said, “tiny oil-rich countries like Bahrain and Brunei were the mice that roared. Tomorrow, Lithuania.”
Chairman Dormand described the pro-Western, probusiness Free Market Party Company as “currently the only political movement in Lithuania willing to deal fairly and responsibly with Western capital markets.
“Our misfortune,” Dormand said, “is that most of Europe’s reserve sand-and-gravel capacity is in the hands of Baltic nationalists beside whom Muammar Gadhafi looks like Charles de Gaulle. I scarcely exaggerate in saying that the future economic stability of the EC is in the hands of a few brave Eastern capitalists like Mr. Misevičius …”
The beauty of the Internet was that Chip could post whole-cloth fabrications without troubling to check even his spelling. Reliability on the Web was ninety-eight percent a function of how slick and cool your site looked. Although Chip personally wasn’t fluent in Web, he was an American under forty, and Americans under forty were exquisite judges of what was slick and cool and what was not. He and Gitanas went to a pub called Prie Universiteto and hired five young Lithuanians in Phish and R.E.M. T-shirts for thirty dollars a day plus millions of worthless stock options, and for a month Chip rode these slang-slinging Webheads mercilessly. He made them study American sites like nbci.com and Oracle. He told them to do it like this, to make it look like this.
Lithuania.com was officially launched on November 5. A high-res banner — democracy pays handsome dividends — unfurled to the accompaniment of sixteen joyful bars of the “Dance of the Coachmen and Grooms” in Petrushka. Side by side, in a rich blue graphical space below the banner, were a black-and-white Before picture (“Socialist Vilnius”) of shell-scarred façades and shattered lindens on the Gedimino Prospektas and a luscious color After photograph (“Free-Market Vilnius”) of a honey-lit harborside development of boutiques and bistros. (The development was actually in Denmark.) For a week Chip and Gitanas had stayed up late drinking beer and composing the other pages, which promised investors the various eponyms and inseminatory privileges from Gitanas’s original bitter posting and also, according to the level of financial commitment,
time-shares in ministerial beachside villas at Palanga!
pro rata mineral rights and logging rights to all national parklands!