On letter-writing in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

I wrote a letter eleven days ago to an elderly neighbor - well, ex-neighbor, I guess. Though, no. He’ll still count, always.

Dick lived across the street for years and years, since decades before we came 23 years ago, and he is now in his nineties. A lifelong bachelor; a retired schoolteacher. A gentlemanly, conversational fixture of the neighborhood. He would come over, thin as a rail, walking slowly in very rickety fashion, and we would have long conversations about the state of the country and the Republicans and the world. And he always remembered everyone’s birthday on the street. A couple of years ago, the stress of worry about his ability to maintain his home having been weighing on him more and more, he moved into a rest home across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, but he still remembers everyone’s birthday.

Sure enough, I got a card from him this birthday, one day early.

So I wrote up what the street was like, and basic summertime activities, and a party I went to that I was nervous about but that turned out not to be a drunken wallow after all, and the neighbors’ and our respective bamboos simultaneously threatening to eat our entire yards, and our story of the exploding plastic sawhorse that was a replacement for the plastic sawhorse whose legs unexpectedly went Cubistically curvy (we suspect they don’t deal well with heat - we had an impressive streak of hot days), and so on.

It was as sensory and non-interior as a letter written by a cat.

The one I wrote him last year I wrote him in a frothingly interior mood.
The first part of it was Trump and Republican stuff. The then-impending tax cut, for the most part.
I discussed the puzzle of the formation of that strange very-elongated object that had just pinwheeled through our solar system and back into interstellar space.
I did discuss a few commonplace topics like the Horror of Room-Cleaning and my machine for making pot brownies. (The novelty of which topic has begun to distinctly wear for me.)

But then I ended with my maddening discovery that Robert Zubrin, one of the most forward-looking and brillantly specific voices on space travel and colonization and extraterrestrial resource use and the importance of investment therein - a person whose books and general work on this I really think should be read more, urgently even, and should have been acted on more, long since . . . is also a stalwart Julian Simon fan who thinks global warming is a fraudulent worry (he has kept tweeting that plant growth is increasing with the CO2 increase - which is true and confirmed by satellite imagery, but it’s hardly the whole picture) and who believes that environmentalist/ecological concern is the darkest of psychological cults, in which false pictures of doom must be perpetrated in order to be able to fulfill a dark, gnawing need to Control All Aspects Of Life. Which is why things like that increase in plant growth must be obscured and denied! (actually us worriers are desperate for any ace that may come out of the deck). He has written a book on this.
Robert Zubrin is pooping on Robert Zubrin!!!, is what I did not quite wail in the letter.

(Really, this is a disaster in my head for the Grand Strategy which is not actually happening.)

I don’t know which letter was the better sort of letter for Dick. One thing you do not know, when writing to a very old man you have not seen in a while, is what sort of letter may now overwhelm him. The only recent information I have is his alarmingly shaky handwriting on the birthday card.

(Although I did get a postcard in reply back from him last year in which he agreed with me that Trump is a - did he say “poopyhead”? Something close. Which I can take as some evidence that dementia was not then involved.)

In any case my mother tells me each time that the letter is too long. 3,500 words last year; only 2,200 words this year. Of course Mom sees the big sheaves of printed pages that result from my using easy-to-read large font sizes.

What’s too much? I worry more about what’s not enough. Of course this is always the shallow-feeling end of the year for me - late July and early August are the eye of it - but I haven’t exactly been passing out tracts or nailing anything up on any church doors.

There is reacting to Donald Trump and to the world in Twitter, but that’s like a high-blood-pressure version of the Buddhist monks who (if I’m not muddling things together) write haikus, fold the bits of paper into origami boats, and send them down the stream one after the other.

Otherwise the closest to intensive, meaningful letter-writing I’ve been doing is the thousands of Comments I do in my job when I’m editing a manuscript. Which is indeed pretty close to it. Trying to closely explain my every thought and consideration, and fast! So that, if the writer doesn’t solve a problem in the way I’ve suggested, and especially if there may be no second pass, he or she will understand the situation well enough to fix it another way without catastrophe. Truly ambitious epistolary attempted mind-melding, that is.
But all this voluminous expression is being sent to someone who, not infrequently, is looking at my having made an average of two strong suggestions and two mandatory changes per paragraph and who may have increasingly firm views on my guts. :-)

(Fulfilling? Since you mention, yes. :-) But it’s the second occasion to bring up that scribbling monk sitting at streamside. All those encapsulated delicate balancings will vanish like a dream when the prose is finished. I carefully craft each of my sandy footprints in full knowledge of the tide coming in.)

Letter-writing is otherwise a narrow field for me. I just saw reference to a study that found that people like getting thank-you letters a great deal more than the people who write thank-you letters expect. But I’ve always been loath to write such things. Or to even consider it. They feel like I’m emphasizing that I exist. Having dealt with me once, the people must now deal with me again, because I have seen fit to bring myself again to their attention . . . I know that this is abject nonsense, but it’s very me. The horror.

While, in the meantime, I am always waiting - though not in the sense of always thinking of it (or am I?) - for someone to ask me a question.

Ask me a question, and I will drag down the moon and the stars to testify.

Last updated August 17, 2018