I’ve recently come to the realization that I say I’m sorry because I lack self-confidence, self-worth, and self-respect. I’m starting to understand that if I’m going to get serious about really loving myself, just as I am, I am going to have to stop apologizing for everything. So you will understand that I have nothing to say about having just crashed your car into a telephone pole.

Some people have an elegant stride that turns heads while it enhances physical fitness. You do not. If you insist upon running in public, you need to listen to me because when I was seven years old I watched Frank Shorter and his mustache compete in the Olympic marathon on ABC television. I got up and ran around the block until my thighs wore new fringe into my Levi cords cut-offs. My PF Flyers were patched with blood. The feet on my striped Hang Ten tank top bounced and twisted over my sweaty orbs.

I understand that you’re only four, but I am going to take this opportunity to educate you about hair discrimination, as your parents apparently have not done. It’s not their fault they are unintelligent and ill-mannered. Your mother has straight, shiny, Pantene ad hair, and I bet your dad does too. Sadly, to the world at large, their beautiful, movie-star-like hair completely obscures their callous, empty souls and lack of social graces.

I’m sick of recycling, aren’t you? It’s annoying. I hate separating all those paper product packages and folding them up or rinsing out plastic lids and sticking them in little green bins. I miss the old days when you could drive down the highway and lob out your empty pizza box and watch it travel like a Frisbee into the nearby woods. Back in those days people were still pretty much free to behave badly, but not today. Now we have to act “responsibly” and dump all our trash on the floorboard of the car. There are stiff penalties if we don’t.

The hick of today is a stunning sophisticate compared to his counterpart of only one or two generations ago. Often flaunting an Ivy League education and a job in the public eye requiring diplomacy and social nuancing, today’s cracker, compared to yesterday’s in terms of sophistication, is as Rand Paul is to Harry Truman, or as Jeff Daniel is to Oliver Hardy, or as Miley Cyrus is to Minnie Pearl. You would never guess how many influential politicians, trend-setters and opinion-mongers are actually outlanders from benighted states like Ohio and Texas and Kentucky, but grown remarkably adept and refined.