You're My New Pal!

Simon Cowell is leaving his job at American Idol.

Sarah Palin is accepting her job at FOX News.

Mark McGwire used steroids.

And, in other news, I just thought about sex twice and my right foot's asleep. Oh, and I'm thirsty. Get me a Caffeine Free Diet Coke, please.

Sometimes I get so aggravated with the news and pop culture and people and things in general and my right foot that I just want to bitch slap somebody or choke the balls off somebody's kid. But I would never do either of those things-- so I blog instead. It seems to do the trick, but maybe that's the reason that I haven't missed a day of blogging in 337 days (on this blog) because my level of ire is rather like the limbs of a freshly eviscerated starfish-- just keeps coming back, don't it?

I've thought about other outlets for aggression, and I don't think any of them would work as well as blogging. I've thought about joining a church choir, but I think I might be too tall. There's always book clubs, but then we're getting back to situations where the urge to choke people's balls off continues to pass for a good idea. My guy friends, if I had any, might suggest I up the frequency of my mastubatory engagements, but I don't see how that would be possible. I've thought about taking up the cello, but I have a rule about musical instruments that resemble blood relatives. Working out might be a possibility, but gyms are very expensive and my skin is a veritable magnet for life's various fungi. Plus, I look like a concentration camp survivor in a singlet. You're required to wear a singlet at the gym, right?

I did have one idea that I thought might alleviate stress and provide me with a creative outlet at the same time, and I think I may be kind of a genius for coming up with this so, if you think it's stupid, just be careful with my fragile self-efficacy here, please. Okay, here goes:

I think I should get myself a pen-pal.

Right?

Now, before you get all indignant/protective/alarmed/uppity, please know that a pen-pal wouldn't be instead of the blog, it would be in addition to. A supplement, as it were. However, this brilliant goddamn idea of mine is not without its thorns. Let's examine them, me and you:

* Who would this person be?

After I spend five minutes with most people, I want to remove their eyes with a lobster fork, hog-tie them and mate them with a rabid horse. I realize that this says more about me than it does about "most people" but the problem is still there, like a deceased insect caught underneath your windshield wiper. Is there really a person out there with whom I could correspond, with regularity, feigning interest in their inane prattlings about the weather in Belgium or their mom's radical hysterectomy or the pubic lice they found in their Kraft Bologna & Cheese or the laugh-a-minute antics of their autistic guinea pig, Fredo? What kind of person would I like to be pally-wals with over the written word? The last person I was sort of pen pals with was my wife-- we courted over email for a long time before we ever even met in person. Is there anybody out there who could compete with that?

* What would we talk about?

The autistic guinea pig, I guess.

* Do people even have pen-pals anymore?

The last time I had a real, honest-to-God, paper-and-pen pen pal, I wore sweatsuits seven days a week and was working on both sarcasm and cursive. I don't remember much about her, but I'm pretty sure her name was "Jill." She lived in some other place that was so far I couldn't get there, not even in my new Reebok Pumps, which I made my mother buy for me because, when I pumped them up in the fitting room and pushed the little rubber button that made the air come out, I thought the sound was hilarious. Jill and I wrote to each other about Christ-knows-what, and, I'm sure, if her parents ever read the contents of my letters, they would have been convinced Jill was writing to a seriously ill forty-five-year-old with a tremor. Jill is probably in women's prison now, with lots of pen-pals of her own.

* How do you go about getting a pen-pal?

I don't want to write to somebody who's in prison, even if it is Jill and, short of that, I don't know of any organized way for a twenty-nine-year-old of relatively normal intelligence and capabilities to go about scoring a pen-pal. Putting an ad on Craigslist will likely conclude with either or both of us ending up on "Dateline" and I think a local rectory message board is the wrong way to go for a gaggle of reasons.

* What if my pen-pal is a better writer than me?

I mean, that would piss me off. They've got to be good enough to hold my interest and so I don't post their letters on this blog and make fun of them, but they can't be too good or I'll get really turned off, go into my bedroom closet and cry while pulling all my clothes off the hangers and covering myself with them, gumming onto various shirt sleeves until they are soaked and bloodied. I'd like a famous pen-pal, because most famous people are almost guaranteed to not know how to write particularly well. I mean, have you ever read some of Al Pacino's tweets? He must do them drunk.

* Do I sign my letters to my pen-pal with my real name, or "Mr. Apron?"

See, if I sign them with my real name, then the smarmy little fucker can't ever know about my blog, because we don't mixy-matchy. Then again, if you sign a letter "Mr. Apron" the pen-pal will be like, "What the fuck? Your family name is a dingy, crusted piece of cloth people wear to get their crotch area so as not to be covered in cocoa powder when they're making cupcakes?"

And that's awkward. So, I think the solution is:

One of you has to be my pen-pal.

Any takers?