My Dear Cousin - The Wedding

15^th May 2021

My Dear Cousin,

After all the letters I have sent, I suppose this brings us to (Pony Girl)’s wedding so many years ago. She had gotten money for college and I hadn’t. Now the old man was giving her thirty thousand dollars so she could move out and start a family.  I hear she found thirty thousand too little and then had him give her another thirty thousand on top of that.

Needles to say, after all the money she had cost me and all the pain I did not go to my (Pony Girl)’s wedding. This was a big deal to Uncle Allen at the time, he called himself Sid then, and he protested.

I hadn’t seen the man in more than twenty years, and he said he wanted to catch up, so I went and got my old high school yearbooks. (Pickle) and I, Allen and his family, all went to a pizza place, and he spent the time trying to get me to go to (Pony Girl)’s wedding.

I had been told to leave and never come back. I had been told that I would never get my part of my mother’s estate which was a fully paid for home in California not far from the heart of Los Angeles. Here was this woman trying to steal two hundred thousand dollars from me and I was supposed to go to her wedding?!

Old Allen held his guns till the end. He did everything he could to get me to go, but family was over for me. I remember my (Pony Girl) leaving a Hawaiian shirt, the dress for the wedding, for me if I changed my mind.  

(Pickle) would never forgive me for him having to pay another utility bill and my (Pony Girl) wouldn’t pay her part of the property tax for more than another ten years. Still, the family was far from done cutting into me. There is still more to come.

Best,

 

Richard Leland Neal

 

Things that Bean Touched

7^th November 2018

Dear Party People,

I was on my way home from the night shift last week, and I left my radio on from the night before. What should I hear but Kevin and Bean talking about Bean eating strange things with a knife and fork. I'll grant you that I've gotten half a slice of pizza down with a knife and fork before switching to my hands, and I didn't hear what the listeners had to say, but it was clear by the time I got home that the lot of you had missed the big point.

It's not like you not wanting to eat with your hands. It's that no one in their right mind, or Bean's mind, would want to eat with Bean's hands. Not even Bean. Just think about this for a second. If you had to be tied up and have a member of the morning crew feed you with their hands who would you choose? How many of you would eat food Bean touched?

Think of where those hands have been. What parts of goats, dogs, or any other animal has Bean touched, and no matter how much he washes his hands he can't wash the Bean off. Even Bean knows how disgusting Bean is and how wrong it would be for Bean to touch food.

After all, didn't bean choose Radiohead's 'Creep' as the song at his wedding. Or was that Kevin? It's still so hard to tell you two apart. That's not the point. The point is that no food should ever be so insulted as to be touched by a creep the likes of Bean.

I would think that would have been obvious,

Richard from Whittier

Hospital Food

12^th June 2012

Dear Cassi,

One of the points I failed to bring up about my trip to the hospital was that I had three hours to kill between appointments and as long as it feels like I spent in the pharmacy it just wasn’t that long. So, my doctor mentioned that there was a cafeteria on the same floor as her office and as I had not eaten it decided to take my laptop out and spend some time there. I walked in to see what reminded me of a high school cafeteria with the registers well out of site.

       

I walked around for a few seconds wondering where the plates and trays were until I saw that small stacks of disposables sat around the place. The trays were cleverly hidden behind the door so it took me a minute to find them.

       

There was a small selection of reheated food and baked goods. I grabbed a cinnamon role and what looked like a long photograph of pizza. It was the thinnest pizza I have ever had and it had the consistency of beef jerky.

The next disappointment came when I found that they only had diet soft drinks. They really are no better for you then their calorie ridden cousins. Some would even say they are worse, but whatever they are their chemical foulness has never passed with me.

Turtle Nose, if you recall, had a thing for diet soda and so in supplementing he was always eating ice cream. It turns out that diet sweeteners make you want sweet even more and drive your wait up. A diet high in diet sweeteners is often one high in sugar because of the craving. That and they make me ill.

I sat eating what was food only in name and hammering on keys working of a report for school. The place was empty, can’t imagine why.

Eat natural, little sister,

Richard Leland Neal