A PUBLIC LETTER to A.R.:

I still have not received my books by mail.

I maintain that I want you nowhere near my house or family.

Do not call my home.

I know you have had time by now to accrue the necessary funds to mail me the novels that have been sitting in the back seat of your car.

May the record show that this debt precedes all others. Once I receive my books again our business is concluded. They were leant before any other debt was formalized, so they are a priority. No formal debts precede them. They are all so a very clear item insofar as they are my concrete possession with a personal history and a sentimental (not merely monetary) and intellectual value.

Any debts you imagine me to owe to you are illusory. Those debts were NEVER formalized. I agreed to them under pressure, at times even coercive. I was desperate to save a project that, despite never having been a source of either profit or status for me, and despite having been chiefly a platform for YOUR creative expression*, was dying owing to YOUR neglect. You made your apathy clear, so even if one were so naïve as to believe that you could not find the TIME to water the proverbial plant, and that all the more self-interested uses of your time (including card-playing) were supposed to benefit US by benefiting YOU, one must still conclude that YOU had no intent to benefit US, except on a whim.

*since my Chief Ambition all ways lay in Music and Theatre, as you were keen to point out when you treated me with unwarranted suspicion, imagining the Project to be “merely” a vessel for my Music, as though I needed the means towards that end and would trust you over myself in that regard, when you so clearly distrust me.

In the Future: spare no expense for those who are trying to help you. When you spare no expense, they feel an obligation towards you, and they work tirelessly in order to see the success of your enterprise, for fear that, through their own sloth, they might lead the Project to fail, so that not only THEIR time and energy, but YOURS, will have gone to waste.

Conversely: when you spare ANY expense, they feel as though they are no longer an inconvenience to you. They feel DISPENSABLE, UNNECESSARY, and at worst USED. If you are unwilling to provide for them, though able to, they imagine that they might as well Not Be There, for you have no intent to acknowledge their presence as a priority that you are willing to make a sacrifice for. They might as well not know you, and this archaic form of “rugged individualism”, far from making either party appear more “independent”, leads a Rational Man to the INEVITABLE conclusion that the Time and Energy that he has spent on you has all READY gone to waste, because the Project was never INTENDED to succeed. Your apathy evidences that, as do your accusations of ulterior motives, which make their way back to you against the backdrop of my spotless record of attendance and meeting deadlines. THANKFULLY: I can salvage the Learning that I gleaned from the Experience. REGRETABLY, I must conclude that my presence was only ever aimed at this motive: that you might narcissistically drain Time and Energy FROM me in a display of petty machismo. And I only allowed this to happen to me (yet again!) out of desperation to recover from the last two times that it had happened (which were certainly not the first).

Now: the books. Hand them over. I will not be stolen from any longer. And your ongoing tendency to harass me, either by phone or by other means, (which was, after all, the foundation for our relationship: your cyber-bullying in 2012) will only aggravate your guilt in stealing from me. May the record all so show that any violent impulse on my own part, towards you, was in retaliation, and I got no enjoyment out of it.

Dm.A.A.