Dear Person,

I hope this letter finds you confused and reliant on people with money.

I’m writing, me, the CEO, to let you know about how our big company did something bad.

The people across the street will not teach me piano. They told me ‘no’, even after I had put on a clean shirt, combed my hair, and walked all the way over there. I thought it would be like asking for a cup of sugar, like neighbors sometimes do. “Will you teach me piano?” I asked nicely.

On this day, I had reached the limit of my tolerance. It had gone too far and I now felt compelled to express my disdain for the ubiquity of cheese that has spread like a noxious malignancy throughout our culinary culture. Yes. You heard me. CHEESE! Fromage. Parmesan. Pec-er-ino roman-o. Cheddar. Prov-a-lone. Monterey Jack. I spit out these words like profanities.

My brother Jim called to tell me he was about to bid on a 50-acre island in the middle of the Illinois River.

“We want to scale down,” he said. “Do the Thoreau thing. You know—Walden Pond.”

I wrote seven feature length screenplays between the ages of twelve and seventeen. That’s one per year plus an extra one junior year when I got too stoned by myself for the first time. None of these screenplays were ever produced because I both was underage and undertalented (that’s untalented with an extra der). I list them here so my sister’s future children shall be able to see how much cooler their uncle could have been than them.