Letter to My Beloved Writing Partner, Known For His Delightful, Inviting, Art-Inspiring Subject Lines, Who Has Replaced the Little Darlings with the Damn Date Written as a Damn Series of Eight (8) Damn Numerals Every Single Damn Day.

After Émile Zola

Dear Robert,

Would you allow me, in my gratitude for being your frequent partner in the crime of writing, to draw the attention of your rightful glory to tell you that your star, so delightful, so often hilarious, until now, is threatened by the dullest and most untreatable of middle-age blemishes?

You have passed healthy and safe through hundreds of rejections; you have been despised and rejected by editors, yet now you have conquered the hearts of many and are well-known as a beloved minor poet of the early 21st century.  

You appear radiant as you prepare to preside over hundreds of poems you’ve published in our time, which I have been blessed to watch with you while they come of age under your mighty poet’s guiding hands, and your work will be part of that which will crown our great century of liberty, equality and sorority or fraternity as the case may be!  

But what a spot of mud on your name—I was going to say on your correspondence—is this abominable damn date-in-the-damn-subject-line affair! A council of genius, under order of the editor, has just dared to accept one of your writing partner’s stories, a great blow to all injustice and something to be celebrated with words of mirth and hilarity!  Yet that is not the case! Your brilliant correspondence now has this stain of the foul passage of time on her cheek.  History will write that your keyboard was under your command when this grievous wordless crime was committed.

And it is to you, my darling partner in crime, that I will proclaim it, this truth, with all the force of the boredom of a housewife with a teenage daughter. For your honor, I am convinced that you are unaware of the magnitude of your recent contribution to my suffering. I ask, with whom will I thus denounce the criminal foundation of these guilty truths, if not with you, the first reader of all of my words; if not with you, the writer and reader of my first words every morning?

⁂

Now, the truth about time and calendars:

First, really darling, your subject lines are getting much too damn predictable, which offends me because it is unnatural for me to be able to predict the damn date. 

Second,  I am afraid I am going to have to call the poetry cops pretty soon if you don’t cease and desist already because your current subject lines commit the poet’s crime of redundancy by repeating the damn date again twice in the same damn header since the damn date is already above the subject line in the damn email header. 

Third,  I feel it important that I inform you that in reality, there is a second, unrelated poet’s infraction being committed here, an infraction even worse than the constructing of a sentence using the passive voice—as it turns out, in the state of Virginia, it is a violation of municipal code to waste a parking space intended for a licensed, meaningful or meaningless English or near-English phrase*:  It is a crime akin to parking your rig in a handicapped space when you have the ethics of a vegetarian at a peace sit-in; It is a crime like Santa Claus disappointing adults by failing to put oranges deep in the toes of the Christmas stockings; Worst of all, it is like calling a poem “untitled.” 

*This law has been on the books since the earliest colonial days. Clearly it is time for the Supreme Court of Virginia to update the code to include all other languages—romance languages, that is**.

** Under no circumstance will das Deutsch be tolerated.  

It is to be noted that in the legal code of Virginia, in Section Cut It Out Already, part Seriously I mean it, there is a fifty dollar fine for each such wasted parking space.

Most importantly, Dr. Heikkincense, if I want to know the damn date, and how fast the damn time is passing, and how damn fast my beautiful damn daughter is damn growing the damn up, I will look at the damn calendar my own damn self. 

I feel, in addition, that you have taken away one of your loveliest gifts to me—your wondrous, poem-instigating and often hilarious subject lines, which I enjoyed several times every damn day whether they were damn funny or damn not-funny no matter what.

Please stop with the damn numbers already I want your damn words, darling!!! 

Damn Love,

Damn jennifer