Dear Old Guy Who Always “Happens” To Bump Into Me When I’m Running.
Listen. There is a 2-3 hour window during which I run and walk every morning. Up to 4 or 5 if I’m a little headachy and dehydrated, feeling squirrely or had a rough night. There is no way your fat, sour-cream-blob ass jogs for 2 to 5 hours every morning and you just “happen” to always come thundering up to me *just* as I’m almost out of the apartment complex parking lot. I know this to be true for several reasons, including but not limited to the size of your lard sack and the way you heave like an asthmatic hippopotamus choking on its own drool in the hot African sun.
My favorite grandma always says that 20 goes into 80 a LOT easier than 80 goes into 20. And she couldn’t be more right. You’re about fifty, and I eighteen, but the point is that you’re not ever going to go into me or even come close to maybe going into me. That is just the way the cookie crumbles, gramps. There is a TINY minority of young nubiles who are totally hot for mouth-breathing old goats like you who are about five years away from needing Depends, but trust me. If I were one of those girls, I would have let you know the minute I spotted your rotund abdomen preceding you around the corner as you gallumph, man-titties flying, over to where I briefly alight before setting off. That’s just how I am.
You: Fat, fifty and filthy. Watery gray eyes, nasty pit-stained gray shirt and matching sweatpants. Almost every day you just happen to stop and take a breather whilst I’m getting ready to sprint. Your comb-over/ cul-de-sac hairdo, the likes of which I admittedly have never seen before, is reminiscent of a dead man’s pubes (I’ve actually seen and washed several examples of dead mens’ pubes, so I consider myself something of an authority.) about ten minutes into livor mortis, just as the veins underneath are starting to really take on the appearance of death. You bend over and triumphantly gasp for breath as though you’ve just beaten the high school track and field record with fifteen seconds to spare. You always smile at me with those disgusting yellow teeth, and on your outgoing days you try to make conversation while I try to make myself not stab you without a reason that would stand up to the scrutiny of a judge and jury. “This must be how you stay so purty. I always see you out here. I don’t know how you have time for anything else… I don’t think I ever got your name.” and “Do you have any pets? Do you live alone? What do you do when you’re not out here?” Again. Listen to me. Do you see that crackhead by the Dumpsters with the shopping cart full of baking soda? If I give him a cold Pepsi and a pack of cigarettes, he would be more than willing to punch you in your fat neck for me. Speaking of soda, I saw you spill some out of your “water bottle”. Yeah. Vanilla Coke. The breakfast of champions.
Me: 5″3, muscular with short red hair, green eyes, a pixie face and a body men and women a thousand times more deserving than you have gone breathless over. 120 pounds of steel and sex appeal, with fairly advanced weapons training, a willingness to skip rope with your intestines right here on the street, and a knife in my sleeve to make it happen. While you’re in the basement spanking it to BDSM porn and hating your job as a pizza delivery guy and wishing you’d never had those three kids and divorced your wife (I imagine her name to have been something like “Tammy” or “Judith”) and moved back into your mom’s house, I’m cleaning my guns, studying medicine and three foreign languages, and waiting for the day when I have to RSI you and put a chest tube in your worthless ass when you come cruising into my ER after some young lady finally got sick of you creeping up behind her and pulling her iPod headphones out to ask what she’s listening to. I have lived for eighteen years, lived as a free human being for only about four, and already have made more achievements that set me apart from my peers than you could jiggle your enormous jowls at.
I’d plan a better way to get your disgusting ass away from me, but I really don’t have time for that because, thankfully, I’m moving in less than a month. So tomorrow when I see you loping around the corner, I’m going to do something I’ve never, ever done before. I’m going to have a very frank conversation with you about what you’re trying to achieve. Because, after a month of seeing you flop around pathetically at my feet, you’ve piqued my curiosity almost as much as my fury. I feel that, by presenting your sad excuse for a life to me over and over again, I have in a sense become the therapist. And I really, genuinely would like to know what about yourself you honestly, in your heart of hearts, think that I or any woman like me would find attractive about you. So come on over. I’ll even talk to you like you’re an adult. The world wants to know what you’re thinking. I want you to help me help you help me help you.
And hell, I’ve had a dry spell for hilarious stories to tell my friends lately.
Sincerely,
The girl in 408
