obfuscated.org

Dear John Coltrane,

I would like to respectfully apologize for not listening to your album “Giant Steps” as planned this evening. All the appropriate plans and accommodations were made to enjoy your wonderful recording, but it just didn’t work out.

Honestly, I had everything set up. I was sitting outside enjoying a New Belgium Sunshine Wheat. “Cousin Mary” had just started when WHAM — thunder. Really! In September! In Los Angeles! That just doesn’t happen. Despite the fact that thunderstorms had been forecast since Saturday, well, I just didn’t believe that it would really happen. Oops!

Anyway, it started raining really hard. I did my best to tough it out, but, well, I got wet and I couldn’t really hear the music any more. That sort of defeated the purpose.

Thanks for listening, and I do hope you understand. I’ll give it another go some time real soon.

Sincerely,

cp

Dear Friday and Saturday,

As it turns out, sometimes you have better things to do than blog. This would be unfortunate if it weren’t truly fortunate.

Yours,

cp

Dear Tooth Fairy,

Hey, is there any chance you could stop by the house tonight? The Kid lost another tooth today, and he’s antsy to get rid of it. If you could make it by before 10:30 and have some time to hang out we could have a few cool ones or whatever.

Do you get a lot of time to kick back and socialize when you’re making the rounds? You can’t be responsible for teeth world-wide, can you? There’s some sort of regional thing, right? Do you do just Los Angeles, or do you do all of California, or some portion of the south-west or what? If you have some sort of Tooth Fairy get togethers in Vegas or Reno or Tulsa or someplace like that where all the Tooth Fairy’s world-wide show up, I’ll bet that they’re pretty wild. Probably the last thing you’d want at one of those is to wake up hung over with a big stack of quarters under your pillow!

Here’s a question: are you guys union? I’ve not heard of you ever going on strike, so I’d guess not. Conditions must be pretty good for you to all be independent. The benefits are ok, right? I mean, you’d have to have good dental coverage, wouldn’t you. Have you ever considered organizing? I’d bet that you could at least get better hours if you did; maybe shorter routes. Something like that. Think about it.

Anyway, I’ve got to go. You’re not cookies and milk, right? I always get you and that other guy mixed up (don’t worry — I’ll take care of them in the morning if you don’t eat them). Hope tonight’s shift goes well!

Sincerely,

Corey

Dear The Time Between 6:00 And 6:30 When I Am Usually Asleep,

I am writing to inform you that I will be visiting tomorrow morning. Please do not take this correspondence as a cause for alarm. There will be no formal inspection of your work, nor will I asking you to perform any duties out of the ordinary. Consider this, if you will, a social visit.

Why, you ask, do I not stop by more often? Well, I’ll tell you: I don’t like you. Nothing personal, mind you. I’m sure that you’re a wonderful time of the day and that everybody who spends your thirty minutes awake is much better for it. You simply portend bad things for me, so I make a practice of avoiding you.

It’s always something unusual — and rarely the good kind of unusual — when we see each other. Either I’m having a hard time sleeping or somebody in the house is sick or I have somewhere to be at an altogether unfortunate hour. Take tomorrow, for instance: I have a appointment with my dentist before work. That doesn’t exactly scream “fun,” does it?

There are rare occasions when I do quite enjoy seeing you. If I’m leaving early in the morning for a vacation, you’re my favorite time of day in the world. On days when I barbecue a brisket, our time together is marvelous. These times are few and far between, however. Because of this I am sad.

In closing, I hope our time tomorrow will be as pleasant a visit as possible. Please do not take personally any unkind remarks I might make, as they are certainly not meant maliciously.

Yours,

Corey

Dear Yahoo,

Now that you’ve hired Kevin Sites to do original content from war zones, please please please hire an editor for him. From a recent entry in Kevin’s blog:

Even before first light — U.S. Marines, soldiers and Iraqi National Guard troops swarmed into Falluja. Tanks and heavily armored Bradley Fighting used their main guns to blow up cars and buses parked down side streets — just in case they might be booby-trapped — packed with explosives.

What on earth is with all the dashes? Is this prose or poetry? I honestly can’t tell. Are the “Bradley Fighting” packed with explosives or are the cars and busses parked down side streets? Given only the text here, it’s hard to say.

Kevin, if you read this, there’s a difference between a gritty, in-the-field prose style and simply being grammatically incorrect.

XOXO,

Corey

Dear DWP,

One cable gets cut and half the city goes dark? You’ve got to be kidding me. Please, if at all possible, get your act together. I know people in Hollywood and down town and in Burbank, etc. etc. etc.. I’d rather not have to worry about them because you cut one cable.

Sheesh.

cp

Dear Cloudy Days in September,

Greetings, stranger. You’re new to these parts I imagine. At the very least, I haven’t seen you around in the last eleven years or so that I’ve been here. Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood.

Now, I don’t want to worry you, but you may get some strange looks around the neighborhood. You see, September is supposed to be the hottest month of the year here in the San Gabriel Valley. July is hot, definitely, and August is often times unbearable. September, though. ‘Hoo boy. Some times it’s so hot that your skin can melt right off your body on to the ground, and you chase it when it starts running in to the storm sewers only to realize that it’s pretty darn hard to run on account of all of your organs are falling out of your body. Let me tell you, it’s no fun at all when that happens. No sir.

So here we are. It’s September, people expect it to be unbearably hot, and you show up and give us a couple of really pleasant days in a row. I for one don’t really know what to do with myself. Is it Thanksgiving already? Should I be cooking a turkey today or something? Or, holy crap! Did I miss my plane?? The kid and I were going to go to Chicago for Thanksgiving this year. I really hope the airline will let us get on the next flight out.

Do you see what I mean? You show up and people start to panic. So maybe it’d be best if you were to lay low for a little while and give people a chance get use to you. I’ll bet that once they do you’ll be the most popular type of day on the block.

Yours,

Corey

Dear everybody who still jokingly uses the phrase “the Internets,”

It’s not funny any more. Truly, truly it is not. I thought it was a gas when the big G-W first said it, and you know that I like making fun of people (esp. elected officials) as much as the next guy, but seriously, it’s been months. Stop using it. It’s played out.

The half life of jokes is measured in people who tell it. It use to be that a joke could live on for years and years and years without being told by too many people to be funny. Remember “where’s the beef?” We told that one for years. Back in those days, though, we could only communicate with each other via post or telegrams for the very upper crust.

Now that we’ve all got those new-fangled computers hooked up to the magic internet machine, though, jokes can live much less long. A presidential slip-up can go from the network news to every Funny McJokes-a-lot in the country in minutes. Corporate puns go coast to coast and become unfunny before they’ve aired twice on the west coast.

So we can all avoid these situations in the future, I propose a simple rule: for any media-tourettes-inspired joke, there is a three telling limit. Many of you are somewhere between two and fifty-six tellings over the limit for “Internets.” You may feel free to apply this negative towards the next one to nineteen jokes, depending upon your situation.

Warmest Regards,

Corey

Dear My New Super-Rad Pair of Boots,

Man oh man oh man, do you guys totally rock or what? I must say that you’re by a wide margin the best boots I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned many a pair of boots in my day.

I remember way back when I first wanted to buy you, New Super-Rad Pair of Boots. I was in my early teens and doing a goodly amount of backpacking. I didn’t have the cheese I’d have needed to buy you myself and my parents were far too smart to spend that kind of money on boots for a kid who would only outgrow them in six months. As it was, I went through pair after pair after pair of other boots — all wonderful, mind you, yet they invariably fell victim to my growing feet — always wondering what it would be like with you.

A month ago when I thought I’d be off to England for two weeks of backpacking, I figured hey, my feet probably aren’t growing any more. What the heck. I’ll buy me a New Super-Rad Pair of Boots. Which I did. And here you are. I’ve only worn you on the trail once and around the neighborhood a few times, but already I know that you’re every bit as rad as I thought you’d be.

Thanks, boots. Thanks for being Super-Rad. My feet will appreciate you forever.

XOXO,

Corey

Dear Tuesday,

Did you ever have one of those days when not so much happens and that’s just fine with you? For me, that happens a lot when you’re around, Tuesday. I’m spoken for a lot of other days of the week — I’ve had standing things on Mondays and Wednesdays and Thursdays for most of the last five years, Fridays and Saturdays are always busy, and Sundays are consumed just getting ready for the week.

So thank you, Tuesday. Thank you for never making me leave the house. Some times you just need a night to stay at home and recharge, maybe read a book or watch some SportsCenter. If things go really well, I could even go to sleep early. Oh man, those are the Tuesday nights that I live for.

Thanks for nothing, Tuesday. Seriously!

Corey