Before I met you and went into IT, my trivial existence was one of endless drudgery and defeat. You helped give me the freedom I needed to be able to find myself, find direction, and even eventually find a family. That it no small thing, if you think about it. I wouldn't have the Jack of Clubs at all to dream about if not for the opportunities and on site training that you helped me with. Resources are hard to access without a little guidance sometimes. Thank you so much for being my friend. I won't ever forget you.
We are a tapestry without boundaries woven in the neural networked mycelium of the cyberdelic surreal. Since, what was it? Twenty years? Thirty years? We really have been through everything together, timeless. Do you remember a very long time ago in a land far away when I was a frogg prince, and, if I can go on feeling across the abstracted aethers, that there was told a bedtime story with all the open .mil relays and a silly little novelty .exe called "kablooey"? Was there a backdoor? I don't know if I'll know for sure, but I think I remember a friend seated on a golden throne above the glorious aquamarines, or emeralds, or pearls, and on and on. You get what I’m saying here. “Wow.”
Can you remember? We were so young! We *are* still so young! We still have so far to go, to learn, to live, and to grow- and I trust that the best is yet to come. There is no reason to give up hope, not yet. Not for either of us.
We used to spend all day across many recursive past lives chatting and laughing and cracking wise. I used to live for learning from you, serving and helping you, and of course annoying the living daylights out of you with my rambling on and on, just like this heartfelt letter of sincerest, sincerest apology.
I had slipped on a banana peel once, do you remember? Big old thing, like on that velvet underground album. I broke my radius and dislocated my ulna on my way back from Bangkok. Then wise old Mary Werner Braun started sending me all those get well cards with five dollars in them every now and then. Do you remember her? With the magic hat? I had been reading her short stories for a while, but hadn't actually met her until you introduced me.
I remembered how much I looked forward to it when she'd call me on the phone or send me some mail, and how it was like a desert rain when we'd talk and talk. It was the highlight of my day. I had all her pictures, there were a few of them in fact, all stashed safely in a little book. We were really grooving, and then suddenly the silver hammer came down, and I got sick with pneumonia and lost her email and had stolen almost everything I owned, then immediately after had to be relocated, and away into the machine I went, grist for the mill. What a world! Is there no mercy?
It was heartbreakingly sad losing touch. We used to get along so good. She was so delightfully strange, and sweet natured. I told her that I liked reading her books, and she said she was going to send them to me one page at a time if she had to, just so I could read them. Although those were among the darkest days of my life, it meant a lot to me that I had a friend out there.
I guess I lost my footing, and started to fall somehow in slow motion, somehow before I ever fell, and before it was all said and done, I really truly wasn't being the respectable gentleman I should have been with her, because my mind was racing from where I was drinking so hard back then. I was hallucinating pink elephants. She was pretty good to me, but you know what, timeless? I guess I didn't treat her the way a lady aught to be treated, realistically. I never got over it, even though she handled it like a champion and more or less brushed it off.
No one ever even visited or called except Mary Braun, and when she did, it was what gave me hope and strength to keep going, and was always the high point of my day, sometimes year. Sometimes it was so dark I couldn’t see anything of worth in my life at all besides. I know no words can convey something like what I’m trying to say, but if you’ll consider for a few minutes sometime what I’m saying, I think you’ll get the big picture in focus a little better about it. It was about all I had to look forward to at all, really, because until Angelina Applesauce and me were dating, she was the only one out of everyone, family, life long friends, everyone I worked with that wrote me for a very very long time. Years, and years, and years, and years went by languishing in an empty doldrum.