Good day dear friend.
I hope you are doing fine today.
Thank you for your email asking for a little more time to reconsider my offer and I must say that in your writing if I disregard the explicit meaning of your actual words I sense the many deeply-felt sensations that lie behind them as you project a marvelous sapience that makes your writing so sincere and unequivocally yours and I once again can behold the self-aware intelligent person the thoughtful steady person who considers every possible outcome before she makes a decision.
Among other things you tell me is that you are skeptical of joining me since your life is already complete with your condo that you own your job which provides you with your identity as a writer and your friends about whom you do not say very much before you pivot to the thought that getting such a great deal of money while you are currently in so much debt sounds wonderful but you believe your earning potential is destined to grow in the future and why would you want to expose yourself to such terrible disruption at this stage of your career?
The answer dear friend is all around you.
As you step outside your cramped and dingy ground floor condo on a dilapidated street in a minor city the answer is all around you if you are only willing to look and listen.
The noise the smell the filth the disorder of things overwhelms you and from the moment you place one foot on the doorstep you’re struck by the dreariness of everything and you pause concentrate hold your breath and force yourself to suppress the sensations that accost you even as you’re hit by that thunderous chest-cavity reverberation that comes from the ridiculously loud motorcycle belonging to your testosterone-depleted neighbor next door just twenty-three feet away who revs his hadean machine over and over as the acrid blue smoke starts to billow across the neighborhood where nobody will dare to object nobody will say anything because he is so ill bred so malignant so indifferent so vulgar so of a violent nature and possibly mentally ill and how is it possible he is able to begin his revving at the exact moment you exit your condo you wonder but it always happens this way and you know he will drive off in two or three minutes and a measure of peace will return to the neighborhood so you can begin your day in a better emotional state and hear the sounds you prefer the ones he has so effectively erased which include your thoughts.
So you turn and go back into your apartment and stand holding the interior doorknob while you wait for him to finish and it’s true he drives away at last and the sound of his enormous motorcycle recedes.
You exit your condo again and now you can hear the background hum of the city a provincial city not a major one and now you hear the rustling of branches in the oak tree less than seventy-five feet from your doorstep which by some miracle has endured for more than a hundred years long before you arrived long before your condominium complex was constructed or the city had spread out into these foothills and it is the breeze that makes its branches rustle and now you notice other harder to hear sounds delicate sounds produced not only by the leaves in the old tree but by other objects being shifted by the wind and you begin to notice the sounds of birds signaling to each other a crow a jay a gossip of wrens hidden by the foliage of the bottle brush tree growing out of a square in your dirty sidewalk all with distinct voices you think as you strain to focus your hearing still it is hard to distinguish everything one from another and you become distracted by a passing car the metallic banging of a trash compactor unintelligible yelling coming from inside one of the houses across the street but wait there are other sounds as well the sounds of your own body your breathing the interplay of the various delicate bodily components interacting with each other the changing pressure in your organs the interplay of bacteria in your gut the movement of your eyes in their sockets and the batting of your long beautiful lashes.
And these are true sounds so often washed away by your noisy thoughts and worries.
When you say that rumpus doesn’t concern you and that you think he’s not as bad as everyone makes him out to be I quickly become concerned about your emotional health and sanity but then I remember how your thoughts are distorted by disappointment and as disagreeable as this realization is your misplaced allegiance begins to make sense to me and I remember how certain I am that you are a compassionate and moral person and recall that your life is not an easy one living in the town of your childhood where you stayed behind despite your artistic ambitions to care for your aging parents who have long since passed but by that time you had become entrenched in your job where your intelligence and value to the company is continually questioned by a stupid and insensitive manager who lords over you and berates you criticizes your writing style the quality of which you admit sometimes flags out of the sheer boredom of always pretending to be interested in the promotional pieces they assign you but still you write them in order to put groceries on the table while you are very aware that this job will soon disappear not because of your manager’s perceived lack of quality in your work which she can actually see is quite high though she believes it to be in her career’s best interest to demean you and sustain the mindset that you are an unimportant and replaceable component of her “team” while you suffer through the daily humiliation of having to write drivel like the drivel in the assignment you are currently working on for a national robocall firm where you are required to provide five iterations of the ring in the new era initiative to advance internal excitement for the sales and marketing staff of a company whose business is to produce thousands of customized robocalls for a long list of bunco industries whose only purpose is to con and confuse disturb and disrupt the lives of senior citizens with repeated odious recorded messages featuring friendly but solemn voices suggesting electricity gas heat phone tv water may soon be turned off if they do not respond to a special operator whose true purpose is to sell a home security system a subscription to a functionally illiterate magazine sliding windows plastic siding duct cleaning pet theft insurance and sundry other overpriced shoddy and inferior scam products and now you have been given a mandatory set of words to work with including bold, evolving, diversity and innovation but ironically in spite of all your efforts to undertake this onerous task your manager this self-important nincompoop along with all the rest of your team will lose their jobs at the same time you lose yours because your entire department is days away from being replaced by a piece of software.
And still you write me about the professed happiness of your current life with the knowledge that your work is meaningless and anxiety-inducing with its idiotic meetings in which the various account executives and managers and writers posture and speak empty phrases before staring back down at their phones their pocket-sized security blankets as you find yourself thinking again how all of you will soon be replaced by an Ā-eye system that even now the company is testing and asking for your help to implement by having you fill in questionnaires about your writing process and when the new system is launched it will do your work of hours in seconds and never become disillusioned or bored by it.
And what will you do then you wonder will you finish the novel you started in college and you smile for a moment thinking that you can soon turn your attention back to your postponed dream but you also know your chance of that novel being published in the current cultural zeitgeist is nil and you will starve when the unemployment insurance runs out.
This is the point dear friend where you need to face your true reality this is where you need to pull yourself together break away from your stifling existence and begin to rebuild your life as the smart engaged creative socially responsible person you were always meant to be alive in a healthful financially secure environment surrounded by sincere and sympathetic friends who share your values.
I hope I have done my best to answer your questions and reiterate once again that I am here eager to help and guide you.
I have emailed my deceased client’s bank manager to say I am buried in extra work and suffering with tonsillitis making it impossible to speak which has delayed me from interviewing my client’s last living relation and only living heir.
None of that is true of course I only wrote this to buy you time a few more days to come to the realization that instead of the usual squalor chaos danger poverty smoke and noise your finest dreams are waiting at your doorstep now and all you need to do is tell me you are ready.
Thank you dear friend.
Advocate argronominious-don
I am enjoying this series. I think you have figured out a good approach for the Substack format.
Can the Dear Friend be considered an actual character? If not, she's becoming very well fleshed out for a non-character.