I’m in a car with no cassette tapes or CDs and I’m flipping radio stations rapidly between the six preset and thus easily locatable locations on the dial. There’s nothing on and I have that “57 Channels and Nothing On” post-consumer, dry, sweaty feeling which is rather suddenly relieved by a song that’s not too bad.

Every now and then someone writes a letter that perhaps oughtn’t be sent. The following story within a letter is possibly one such instance of that.

An Epistolary Blog Post

The advertisement, as they ran it on Craigslist:

Used crib and crib mattress For Sale. Slightly chipped. $30 O.B.O.

Next to it: pictures of the crib, dents, scrapes, stains and all.

Waiting for a response, Richard continued packing the car. He had been on a ten-month research fellowship in Las Vegas, on sabbatical from his job in Pennsylvania.

Vic Thompson is a dreamer, so sue him.

Sitting in the upper last row of Wyatt Hall, Matt stretched his long legs under the fold-up desk top. He looked down past his fellow students’ heads to barely catch something Dr. Mock had said about verisimilitude, whatever the hell that was.

People often asked Jacob what it was like to be slapped in the middle of the forehead all the time, and he had no answer, no frame of reference by which to even attempt an answer. To Jacob Frohmstein being slapped in the forehead and the experiential life of a human were the same thing.

One morning when Henry was sitting at work, it occurred to him that the Fourth of July was nearing much more rapidly than he had realized. Instead of feeling joy about his three day weekend, he felt a nagging sickness in his stomach. Something was dreadfully wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. For the rest of the day he sat isolated in his cubicle, skipping out on his lunch break and both of his coffee breaks, desperately racking his brain.

At first he thought that perhaps he had missed his anniversary or his wife’s birthday, but then he checked his desk calendar and verified he still had months before those dates. Perhaps there was a big family trip planned. Or a piano recital for one of the kids. Somehow he would have to get the information out of his wife when he arrived home.