The following letter, which harps on the past, was originally published at Paul Tough's Open Letters web site (openletters.net).

Al,

Thank you for the birthday card. I received it several days ago, but kept it sealed until yesterday, my birthday proper, and opened it at the end of that horrible day. Your card made me stop crying.

My friends threw me a party two nights ago, a midnight cookout in the courtyard of my house. It was hot as shit outside despite the late hour, per usual for Florida. It was a total sausage party: no women, just dudes.

Damon got me a nice glass marijuana pipe. Aaron gave me an expensive bottle of rum. MY SISTER bought me a quarter of brown, Mexican dirt weed. JACK gave me a joint. Crispen gave me a joint. MY DJ gave me a joint. Sean bought me a six-pack of gourmet, imported beer and RICK LOOSE gave me a hit of Ecstasy. Do you notice the pattern? Me, too. So, instead of enjoying the party, I spent it feeling silly about my image at the age of twenty-six. Do none of my friends (besides you) notice that I read and paint and listen to music?

But my dismay over the telling gifts didn't come close to the despair that marked my birthday itself. The morning after my party, MY EX-GIRLFRIEND called and said she wanted to take me to lunch. Her offer was a show of civility, a rarity in the three weeks since we broke up. So I couldn't decline, even though I was pissed that she skipped my birthday party to hang out with that eighteen-year-old boy she's been fucking for five weeks now (you do the math). If I had declined her offer, it would have been my first birthday we had spent apart in five years. I knew the day would end in a fight (as it has the past five years), but I guess that not spending my birthday with her was an act of letting go that I wasn't yet ready for.

But I am now, fuckin-A! Listen to this:

I ate RICK LOOSE's birthday Ecstasy before she picked me up, thinking it would improve the situation. The couple times I've done X have not been lovey-dovey hyper-idealism at all. It's never made me love the people of Earth any more than usual; it simply makes me feel less guilty for not loving them. Everything is lucid and my idealism dissipates. So, I figured, taking Ecstasy before lunch with MY EX-GIRLFRIEND meant that I'd calmly smile my way through the inevitable fighting and see clearly and unsentimentally that we do not belong together. And I need that.

I could already feel the chemicals rumbling in my twitching extremities when she hugged me at my front door. I noticed that she smelled differently. I assumed it was the smell of young boy, but chose to ignore it and wait for the X to choke out my anxieties. I didn't tell her I'd eaten drugs but I did ask her to drive because I didn't want to swerve off the road and kill us both if I saw God or something.

My body tensed up terribly as the chemicals overtook it, but that always happens at first. No matter how good I feel later on in any drug experience, I'm always engorged with nervous energy in the beginning, like I'm not accomplishing something that really needs to get done.

MY EX-GIRLFRIEND's madness began when she asked me where I wanted to eat and I told her I didn't really care. Many of our fights revolve around my inability to suppress my opinions, so it always infuriates her when I say I don't have an opinion. And since she flounders in the face of decision-making, she grew more and more angered by my apathy as we wandered for miles in her Nissan through residential neighborhoods where there obviously weren't any restaurants. She rolled along slowly, as if a restaurant might suddenly appear between the houses, and she asked me again and again, more and more aggressively each time, where I wanted to eat.

I closed my eyes and faced out the window, and in the blackness I pictured the calming effects of the drugs racing against her growing anger, like two noisy, silver trains on parallel tracks. I rooted for the drug train, but the anxiety train was winning: I felt worse and worse as the X welled up in me.

I suggested that she drive downtown, where there are restaurants, and I'm sure it seemed to her that I was just being dramatic by staring out the window and not looking at her when I talked. But whenever I opened my eyes, the scenery stuttered like a defective VCR tape, and so I hid my eyes from her in case they were doing drug-induced back-flips. By the time we arrived downtown, I knew the Ecstasy was bad: I was sweating, my face was flushed, my soul felt rotten. The veins in my arms looked darker than normal and I wondered if there wasn't dirt in my blood. My stomach was cramped, the world was skipping, I couldn't see; and when she yelled at me for being too quiet, I was too miserable to hide it anymore.

"Listen, man," I said as I turned around, "I know you're gonna be even more mad, but I took some Ecstasy that RICK LOOSE gave me for my birthday and I don't know what the fuck is going on, it must be dirty or something, 'cause I'm freaking out."

The word "dirty" reverberated in me as she yelled and pointed in my face, her other hand on the steering wheel. "This is YOUR fault and I'm NOT going to stop. You fucking deserve this, you stupid druggie!"

She'd taken enough acid to know what kinds of dark shores your mind can run aground on when you're tripping and she was ready to take me there, despite my pleading. Her relentless yelling made me feel like a cartoon character being pounded into the ground like a railroad spike by a giant hammer.

"Please please PLEASE, don't yell at me, I'm suffering enough. I feel like I want to die already without you yelling at me!"

MY EX-GIRLFRIEND was merciless, man, and I was holding onto the car's door handle like the prostitutes in Vollman's Whores for Gloria: ready to roll out at any second if the john gets weird or violent. My view was totally pixilated and I was so disoriented that I must have told her I was sorry a hundred times. She got louder and uglier, until I was begging for her mercy. I told her, "It is all my fault. Everything. Just please stop. I'm so sorry, trust me, I'm sorry. You're making me want to die. Just please stop. Save it for later, after I come down from this. When I come down I will stand still and quiet for three days straight and let you yell in my face like a drill sergeant if you promise not to make this any worse right now."

"Really?" she stopped and asked, smiling, it seemed, with morbid curiosity. "You will?"

"Yes," I told her.

"You will let me yell at you as much as I want for three days and you won't fight back at all?" she asked, still smiling, calming considerably.

"Yes." I assured her, ready to do anything to make her stop.

"I don't believe you! It is your destiny to BUY THE COMMONPLACE BOOK…"

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