DEAR TOM
'Maybe you should write a book about the future of reading!'
September 10, 2019,
Dear Tom,
My bank says you haven’t registered for Zelle yet. Maybe I just put in the wrong email or you registered under your phone. Anyway I wired you the rent money this morning in the usual way, and it’ll be there in three days. If we do Zelle, the money will move faster and Bank of America won’t fuck me out of $6 and Citibank won’t fuck you out of whatever they’re fucking you out of. Who knows how Zelle fucks us, probably via surveillance. Anyway sorry to be late on the rent this month.
The summer was a bust. I was broke the whole time. I prioritized cigarettes and cut back on food. Generous people bought me drinks and lent me money. The checks from little magazines take a long time to show up. You shouldn’t expect much from life when you’re a husk of the husk of your former self. In any case, it was quite a time seeing you at the wedding in Boston. Good to know we’re still professionals when it comes to that sort of thing.
I wasted a lot of time in July thinking about ‘the Book Idea’ without writing a proposal. I scrapped one and move to the other one, the one that’s ‘only darkness’. But every time I talked to somebody about it they said, ‘Maybe you should write a book about the future of reading!’ And I said, I don’t care about the future of reading. Or they said, ‘You should write a book about how to be as literary as you are. I remember when we lived together you would wake up in the morning and just start reading a novel!’ And I said, I don’t care about people who don’t read. Let them watch television and listen to podcasts. Or they said, ‘What are you gonna say about this book when you go on NPR?’ And I said, I would say, ‘Terry, did you read my book? See, you and your whole public radio network are the problem. Why don’t you stop interviewing television actors, Terry, and stop making your listeners feel like they deserve intellectual credibility for enjoying TV shows?’
Today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Tom, and tomorrow is 9/11. I miss the 90s, and I miss irony.
But I won’t be missing the rent again.