Letter to My Friends

My friends-

So it’s been 17 years or maybe more and some things have changed. For one I am no longer a fetus. I was born April 22nd 1991 to a pissed off construction worker and a woman who would undertake many careers, but is now a pissed off bus driver. It’s cool though, having two parents who are both utterly frustrated with how their lives turned out will probably make me a better person but seriously not really. If anything, having two people telling me to go to college and not repeat their mistakes makes me want to drop out of school and spend all my time smoking hash and going to Pink Floyd concerts, like my dad did when he was my age. The only problem is that Pink Floyd has broken up in those thirty or so years so I would only be smoking hash all day, which is kind of boring without the prospect of seeing Pink Floyd in concert after the hash runs out.
But one thing I learned to do early on was read. My parents were crazy about reading so I had most Dr. Seuss memorized by the time I was four, even though I didn’t find out he wasn’t a qualified physician till years later, but that doesn’t matter now. It still took me until Kindergarten to finally learn to spell my last name, which I think is impressive because, honestly, how many five year olds know how to spell a fifteen letter last name of German descent? It’s okay, I got all day.
Things kind of hit a rough patch around the second grade. I discovered I had no interest whatsoever in school so I usually sat around zoning out or playing Oregon Trail while all my friends made paper snowflakes and learned how to write in cursive. Somehow my teachers attributed my school-induced braindeadness to a crappy reading ability and thus I spent the next two years in the lower level reading class where we played some dumbed-down version of bingo in order to improve our literacy skills…or something like that.
Everything changed when I got to sixth grade and wrote a story for Language Arts or whatever the hell they called English then. I have a terrible memory but from what I recollect some of my relatives got a hold of it, and it led to an aunt and uncle from Virginia, who I don’t think I’ve seen in person since Clinton was president, sending me a book on how to write great fiction every Christmas. It’s slightly redundant but the store credit I get from trading it in is pretty sweet.
So I’ve been called a good writer but I never really believed that. I always thought everything I wrote gargled balls. Even when I have a good storyline and interesting characters, which I don’t usually have as I often make the story up as I go along, I feel it always goes downhill after five pages or so and that’s lame dude.
Because of that I don’t really consider myself a writer. It may be one of the few things I’m moderately good at, but I don’t consider it a talent or really a hobby. Whenever I write for fun I just get frustrated which leads to a lack of fun, therefore I don’t end up happy with what I wrote, just bewildered as to why there’s a foot-shaped hole in my computer screen. Then I conclude the best idea is to pretend it was already like that and go do something not frustrating, like drive down Grant Road at five in the afternoon.
So before I kick in my computer screen I’ll end this “letter to my friends,” but if we were all actual friends I wouldn’t be writing to you about this, and if I did you guys would probably make fun of me for writing, and then we’d go party. Yeahhh.

Love, Daniel