I just got off the phone with my pops; trying to get a copy of that newspaper article about my saving his life. Hopefully, I can show that to you soon.

But most of the conversation was taken up by my telling him about HORSEGIRL (I'll have a definition and link for her soon). My father was enthralled by the fact that she lives on a farm, as he did in his childhood. I told him about the day her and I spent together fishing and walking among the cow pies and how different she is than most of the women I meet (I guess...I mean, as much as it feels to the contrary; I don't really know her).

Since meeting her I've grown to enjoy eating fish, which was the last food on Earth that I did not like. Now I officially like everything.

I didn't tell Dad about us giggling in the car on the way to the drugstore in Podunk Lithia to buy baby oil and KY Jelly and how much we laughed when we had to ask someone in the store where it was located. "It's in the baby isle," they told us and I tried to quickly muster up a horrible joke about fucking babies but couldn't in time to gross out the cashier.

Whenever I go to a big city like New York or Chicago, I always leave thinking, "I need to live there." I haven't been on a farm since I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Iowa, and I love it just as much. I like the freshwater bait shops and the animals and I like that when I ask for directions and the gas station attendant tells me, "It's just around the corner," the "corner" might be three miles down the road.

Driving away from HORSEGIRL's farm the next morning, through vast fields of dew, I thought how easily I could live out in the country (as long as I didn't have to touch the cows...they're fucking disgusting).

But anyway: there's this website called OPEN LETTERS. It's by Paul Tough who used to be an editor (I think?) at Harper's. The site is just little pieces of literature disguised as correspondence. It's really beautiful and Todd Pruzan of McSweeney's fame suggested I submit something.

So today I wrote the following story about drugs and domestic violence and will revise and submit it tomorrow. It is a true story but keep in mind the subjectivity of the author: there are things that could be written about me that are much much MUCH worse than what I describe below.

Though I am complimented often on the bravery I display by putting these pieces of my life up for public consumption; there are plenty of horrible embarrassing things that I will take to the grave, especially in regards situation such as the following: I leave out most of what I contributed to the dysfunction. Here is my submission to OPEN LETTERS, go check the site, it's awesome:

Al,

Thank you for the birthday card. I received it several days ago, but kept it sealed until my birthday proper, yesterday, 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. THE BASHER gave me a joint. MY OWN PRIVATE DJ gave me a joint. THE PHOTOGRAPHER bought me a six-pack of gourmet, imported beer and RICK LOOSE gave me a hit of Ecstasy. Do you see the pattern here? Me too. So, instead of enjoying the party, I spent it feeling very silly about my image at the age of 26. Do none of my friends (besides you) notice that I read and paint and listen to music?

But the telling gifts didn't equal half my birthday despair: the morning after my party, MY EX-GIRLFRIEND called and wanted to take me to lunch. Her offer was a rare show of civility in the three weeks since we broke up. So, I couldn't decline, even though I was pissed that she skipped my birthday party the night before to hang out with that 18-year-old boy (whom 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 spent apart in five years. I knew it 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 as she hugged me at my front door and 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 ate 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 go to eat and I told her I didn't really care. Many of our fights have revolved around my inability to suppress my opinions, so it 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 in her Nissan through residential neighborhoods where there obviously weren't any restaurants for miles. She rolled along really slowly as if we might have to suddenly turn in when a restaurant appeared out of nowhere. In the meantime 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, surprisingly, the anxiety one was winning: I felt worse and worse as the X welled up in me.    

I suggested that she drive downtown where there were 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 got 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 I was too miserable to hide it anymore when she yelled at me for being too quiet.     

"Listen man," I turned around, "I know you're gonna be even more mad; but I took some Ecstasy that RICK LOOSE gave me 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 at me. "This is your fault and I'm NOT going to stop. You fucking deserve this you stupid druggie!"    

She'd taken acid enough 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, happily, 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?"     

I was holding onto the car's door handle the way prostitutes do: ready to roll out at any second if their john gets weird or violent.     

MY EX-GIRLFRIEND was merciless, man. My view was totally pixilated and I must have told her I was sorry 100 times but 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. 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 trust you!" She yelled and continued to rail.     

At a stoplight, just as I was sure I was about to cry dirty, black tears, I looked over and saw a policeman 100 yards away on horseback watching us wig out in the car. I made eye contact with his horse and wished I'd opted for a birthday pony ride rather than an Ecstasy trip. I thought I saw the cop stretching his arms out to me as if offering to hold me and comfort me. I was drawn to him and my hand moved independent of me, like that movie, Evil Dead, and suddenly the car door was open and I was stepping out and walking toward the cop, planning to ask him for a ride home on his horse.     

But somehow I realized through my delirium that, if I ran to him for salvation, I would have to admit that I took drugs and he would arrest me. MY EX-GIRLFRIEND screamed at me to get back in the car, so, with the policeman and his horse both watching me, I got back in, lapsed into a puddle of tears and asked her to drive me home. Lunchless.     

I stared back out the window at the skipping scenery made more abstract when refracted through my tears and I fell deeper and deeper into sooty despair as she continued to yell at me all the way home.     

We pulled up out front of my house and I opened the car door before the car stopped moving and she actually sped up when I stepped out. I ran toward the house and she backed the car up and stopped, screaming at the back of my head, "Get back here and shut the fucking car door!"    

I slammed my front door and locked it, ran inside and lay in bed and smoked one of the birthday joints and calmed down. But I didn't stop crying until I remembered my unopened birthday card from you lying in the kitchen by the bottle of rum Aaron bought me.    

I really really appreciate it, man. Thanks.    

Seriously.

Your Friend,

Michael