Letters of Not Lite. Dale Shaw
And I am including on this list my mother and the wife of Brad Dourif (the second wife, not the one with the lip thing). Thank you for listening and sorry if parts of this note were smudged. I have been weeping.
Your money is under the guillotine.
Herzog.
Lance Armstrong writes to a fan
25th July 1999
Dear CINDY,
WOW, I mean THANKS SO MUCH for your letter. It just got me so JAZZED!!!!! I mean, just, God it was AWESOME, so so AWESOME and YES! I do get tired sometimes after a race, but then it makes me feel so ALIVE you know? Do you? YOU KNOW? I just feel GREAT! I’ve never felt so GREAT!!
But thank you for asking me that and THANK YOU SO MUCH for the gift. I LOVED the texture of it so much and the way it felt against my skin that I may HAVE slightly DESTROYED it by stroking it so hard and SO MUCH. I stroked it to pieces. But I still LOVE IT! Even in PIECES!! PIECES!!
Cindy, I mean, like YES!!! You are the BEST!!! I could just cycle from here in Colorado over to you in New Jersey RIGHT NOW! Because I am so JAZZED that you wrote to me.
Oh man, you hear that? Oh man, I feel a bit weird. OK, I better go outside CINDY!!
You RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Lance (JAZZED)
Pope Benedict XVI’s handover notes
To his Divine Holiness the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God.
Francis,
Buddy, I hope you like shitstorms – because your life just became one.
OK, the van’s about to come and pick up my stuff, so I’m jotting this down quickly …
Get your order in now for some new vestments. Not tomorrow, NOW. I’d expected some fresh ones to be waiting for me when I started, but all I found was an empty closet. And that stuff takes ages to get made up. I’ve left you a couple of spares in the closet by the vestibule. You’re way skinnier than me (you know you are!) but they’ll do in a pinch. The cleaner comes on Thursday mornings and you do not want to be there when she comes. She always wants something blessed. There seems to be a never-ending amount of paraphernalia. She tried to get me to bless one of those mini Pac-Man games; you know, the hand-held ones, for her grandson. I was like, ‘I can bless that thing all day, but it’s still lame. Unless he’s been in a coma since 1989.’ I didn’t actually say it, but y’know. You’ll get stuck with her all morning if you don’t run off and hide somewhere.
The window you have to wave out of is in the little study bit. You might know that already but no one told me. First Sunday I was wandering around like Our Saviour in the Wilderness trying to find it. And the Cardinals aren’t a bit of use. Great at ring kissing, lousy at directions.
Nuns. Get used to them. They are everywhere, all the time. If you need some ‘alone time’ lock the door. They have special powers or something and just appear when you least expect it. And they don’t say anything, they just stare at you. It’s creepy.
You’re going to be asked a lot of questions about Dan Brown. Do yourself a favour, read The Da Vinci Code. I know, I know, you thought your trials were over and now you’d be on easy street. But honestly, every state function, visit overseas and post-Mass warm down there will be endless theories about it. People think they’re being cute asking you about it. They are not. And you’ll have to watch the movie too I’m afraid. It’s different. You can probably skip Angels and Demons. You can thank me later. The password for the PC in the office is BONO_101. Don’t ask me why, it was that when I arrived. The IT department might have changed it, in which case good luck. It’s easier changing water into wine than getting an answer from those guys. You need vouchers to use the canteen; I left a few in the desk drawer. God knows why they still use that system. I tried to get it changed – you’d think I was converting to Judaism! The uproar! So anyway, it sucks, but there you are. Think that’s it. No idea where the keys to the Popemobile are. I never knew and no one would tell me. HR should be in touch about your pass. Though they’ve probably sent you an email about it, which you can’t access without your pass, as I found out to my cost. And they tell you that you can’t take your picture again if the first one is terrible, but you can, I promise you. OK, have a blast! Drop me a line when you’re settled.
Benedict P.S. A few people will probably ask if you shit in the woods as well. Just ignore them.
William Burroughs rewrites the swimming pool rules
No Running – Unless it’s shit running down good wholesome American legs, forming oily pools of thunder down amongst dark gray tunnels of hopeless, stubborn rectitude.
No Pushing – Because no one likes the pusherman, firing beautiful dreams into dead undersea veins, charred inside like the mind of his degraded and decadent client. His gray, invisible specter that infects his pleasure on the dullest and the damned.
No Acrobatics or Gymnastics – Or the stacking of young malleable flesh on flesh, building a queer ladder to the stars, leading to my waking life, where I sit totally alone.
No Shouting – You never want to attract the attention of the Controller, lest he lets the drip-drip of technological assassination, decontrolling him or herself from some unspecified central point that haunts the horizon like some blood blister left too long to rot.
No Ducking – Certainly not ducking the empty smell of many years, tied into the deviance that can only come through boredom and the parasitic craving that must be fed though a paranoiac insanity of hopelessness.
No Petting – No vetting, no fretting, no bedwetting. Cut off all biological necessity, it will only make you hard and unsound. Sadistic faces beaten with spiritual famine, hell bouncing off the walls, sickness welcomed like a damaged organism.
No Bombing – We need to suffer to show that we are alive and feel that needless, dead-eyed pollution that atrophies and seals off the seductions of the skull.
No Swimming in the Diving Area – Hanging off the board with our ghost fingers, the pink blood filters releasing the odor below you, waiting for you to drop. Above you your enemies circle, waiting to control, like a stuffed animal with glazed eyes bearing down from the wall of a gentleman’s club. Below a pool of savage, distended insects all with the face of a burnt nun.
No Smoking – You enter the Smoke Shop and then you see them. Princes of the spirit, arbiters of pang, bureaucrats who equivocate the past, judges who pass sentence on your future, Gods of Zogoth with fiery temples and split, bitter eyes, doctors turning disease into customary abuse, sick children playing with the larvae at their feet, scientists infecting that larvae, the shrill crone beating you for the rent, the bland, majestic soothsayers tearing up your dreams of death and the stiff, sharp seductress squatting over you with their jutting bones and insect ecstasy. Trunk rental available at the snack bar.
A model writes to Auguste Rodin
Dear Monsieur Rodin,