Greetings constant reader, Stoves here. Woke up this morning with a ghastly jellied feeling behind the eyes & a dwarf in my parlor! Had her dismissed by the help and then helped myself to a little brandy breakfast. Hell of a good time at the Pink Oarsman last night disposing of what little money my driver was able to loan me. Can you believe the cost of a lapdance these days? Inflation was a problem in more ways than one!
The condominium is in terrible disrepair. Trying like hell to recall who I gave the keys to before being dragged off to the pokey, although judging by the graffito on the walls and furniture they didn’t harbor a great deal of appreciation for the gesture. How the mail has piled up! Most of it unreadable documents in legalese, however none more illegible than the inappropriately large number of taunts and jibes, mostly in the form of postcards, from our ‘dear fellow’ Tasty Yumyum. I will not attempt to describe the flowery prose with which the most depraved and unholy scenarios of his demented fancy were communicated. Suffice it to say that the nude photos of my ex-wife enclosed in several of them were quite fetching—I had only to tear his image from them to make them of some use, or else scratch his face from the emulsion with a dirty fork, which was in itself gratifying.
My first order of business after this exercise was complete was to sign a number of documents dealing with the sale of my beloved stretch Hummer, which caused me no little consternation. The help advises me that it was not an easy task to find a buyer for the thing, finished as it is in an iridescent gold with lovely green tones and the expertly airbrushed image of a voluptuous barbarian sorceress on the hood. I am told that it is somehow not a done thing to depict a woman’s nebulized breasts on a vehicle which is subject to the public’s scrutiny, least of all if she should be accompanied by the image of an aroused Mammoth with an electric guitar! My incarceration has done nothing for my account of the tastes of others. At any rate this transaction was performed rapidly and at great financial cost to myself in order that I may have some cash in hand until that redoubtable Marcus Carab furnishes me with the paltry sum he calls an advance [I believe ‘charity’ was his exact wording], which I now do.
I am writing this correspondence from the coach [read: bench] seating of a low-rent airliner which is currently somewhere over central Europe, having just taken flight again after a stopover in Stockholm, ‘flight’ being a term I use very loosely. While there I was unable to resist purchasing a copy of Tasty Yumyum’s Compendium of Byzantine Sex Devices from the Fjällbacka Airport, which I was unnerved to discover is a fictive work. This edition is of course in Swedish, however it comes complete with an author’s photograph on the reverse, which I have taken great pleasure in defacing. The plane has been listing awfully for the last 45 minutes [the pilot, raving and beset by chickens as he is, couldn’t trim a head of hair], but if it ever lands safely at its intended destination I will deign to stop in on a cousin of mine who is also a Baltic prince, or was the last time I spoke to him, there to beseech him to restore my denuded fortunes, if only in a cursory manner. He is an excitable old fellow, however he loved my dear mother very much and I feel certain that he will be disgusted by my present station and lack of prosperity. We shall see.
In the meantime I find myself in the grip of an overwhelming airsickness and must now make use of the supplied receptacle for the seventh or eighth time today. I will be certain to mention to my travel agent that I do not find grocery bags to be particularly luxurious for the purposes of throwing up into, as well as the fact that I believe my flight attendant is a child of no more than nine and appears to be intoxicated.
Yours,
HS.
What word would you have me use? As you well know, there are six Charities in a Stipend and four Stipends in an Honourarium. Keep writing irritatingly brilliant posts like this, and soon you’ll be one twenty-fourth of the way to a Salary!
What a load of ridiculous hogwash. If being a part of this writing club means that I have to subject myself, daily, to an entire month of Stoves’ self-reverential nonsense, I do believe I just might have to grow a moustache and pretend I care about ass-cancer like millions of other douchebags in this sad, fun-deprived country.
Carab, do not be fooled. Stoves is more often paid to stop writing. Do not encourage him, not in the least. You do not want to know on what or where he would spend your hard-earned dollars. Most likely they would be wrapped on the outside flap of a stack of Monopoly money or newspaper in a pathetic attempt to look more like a high roller, a mover, a shaker. His face graces the cash registers of many cheap strip joints and even cheaper brothels. It is not in tribute to a great customer that his photo is placed in such high regard.
My editor’s instinct tells me that if I’m to make a penny off this Stoves character, it’s going to be because of his ego (I’m reminded of words from the great Edmund Blackadder: as capacious as an elephant’s scrotum, and twice as hard to get ahold of.”) so I will feed said ego as necessary. I’m fairly certain he doesn’t read these comments anyway, since he seems to have that until-now-entirely-unrealistic form of sensory aphasia everyone got in that one episode of Deep Space Nine.
Incidentally, I in fact paid Stoves with almost precisely what you described—except the Monopoly money was on the outside, wrapped around bundles of his voluminous and ceaseless correspondence with the English Heraldry society, who continue to refuse his request for “a suitable coat of arms with extra crests and a well-hung lion”, and whose mail he has had forwarded to my office. I have asked him to stop, but he stubbornly insists that I have a secretary, which I don’t. He has named her Toots.