A Letter To You

I wrote this to a friend recently. Now I am writing it to you. All of you. Each and every one...

Hey You:

I'm sitting here, alone in my house, wondering if I've made you mad. You seem like a level-headed person and quite an intelligent one at that. And, while I don't really think you're mad, there is a small part of me that can't help but wonder. You see, I've been pissing a lot of people off lately. Old friends take offense at my opinions on politics and science and religion. New friends look at me with strange faces that say "get the hell away from me, freakboy!"

I'm not trying to make people mad. It just happens. I ask them questions and, no matter how much I say, "I just don't understand your opinion, please explain it to me" or "I'm not trying to demean you or put you down" or "I honestly want to know what you think," they tell me I am too offensive to speak with. They tell me I am weird. They tell me I am stupid and insensitive and a whole host of other mean, nasty, and ugly things that, again, make no sense to me.

Maybe things would have ended differently if I'd skipped computers and majored in English like I wanted to.

At any rate, regarding our recent conversations about [enter issue here], I hope I haven't made you so mad that you want to climb a clock tower with a high powered semi-automatic rifle in order to pick me off from a distance....or blackmail me into committing hari kari...or slip arsenic into my Mountain Dew...or force me to cut off a pound of flesh and affix it to a bomb that is attached to my back in order to stop the timer, which is dangerously close to zero. That's what everybody else wants to do. And the fact that I just don't understand it isn't going to change anything.

So I hope you're not mad. We don't have to talk about politics or religion or sports or law or education or technology or anything that is likely to cause a controversy. We don't have to sit across the aisle from each other and stare at our respective walls, thinking of something banal to say in order to make time pass more quickly. I just hope we can hang out and have a good time.

If that doesn't work, there is always a duel to the death. That, at least, would be fun and exciting. And less painful than talking about politics.

Piece,
The Sasquatch