An Open Letter To Everything
By Dave Horwitz
This is as open as an open letter can get. It is literally to everyone and everything. Every single being in the entire universe. Living, dead, yet to be born, ghouls haunting the spirit realm, aliens with those weird heads and tiny shadow-stick bodies that all movies and TV seem to agree on, the gross scary stuff that lives really deep in the sea from Planet Earth, Beetlejuices, ants, dogs, cats, celebrity chefs, House DJs, grapes, spokesmodels, creeps, guys from your Humanities class named Clark, really zen surfer dudes with no problems and great abs, Tracy Morgan, the Korean animators who make the Simpsons, and wolves and wolf enthusiasts alike. This is for you. Hi! How are you?
I often think about the Neutral Milk Hotel lyric “how strange it is to be anything at all.” Think about it! It is strange to be a thing. It’s strange to be alive and to exist and to think and feel and speak and act. We are all just operating on some frequency that we inherited. No one really knows how to be a person, or an animal, or a fruit, or anything. Once I had a dream where I was talking to my dad, and he told me that he’d written the great American novel and buried the manuscript somewhere in the backyard. After hours of digging separate holes in tight, equidistant rows, I finally found it. It was called “Seattle Number Nine” and in the dream it was, in fact, the best book of all time. I asked him why he never tried to get it published and he said he didn’t know. I pressed him for answers and all he said was, “everyone’s an idiot, and no one knows anything.” To date it’s still the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten, real or imagined.
It’s a wonder why or how we’re ever even a little hard on each other or ourselves when it’s glaringly obvious that NO ONE knows what they’re doing at any point in their lives. There are no universal guidelines. The Bible is a book with words on a page, just like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. Yoga is just moving your body until it can pretzel. Alcohol is just fun poison. Drugs are just scientists trying to make your brian and body do things they wouldn’t normally do. Pizza is just saucy cheese bread. There’s no fucking rules(, dude).
So what’s the point of any of this? This letter, this room you’re in, this city, state, planet, cosmos? What’s the point of a job? To make money to spend on things so you’ll have to keep working so you can have money to spend on things so you’ll have to keep working so you’ll have money to spiral spiral spiral nap nap nap wake up Nutella hike look at a Sunset get choked up call your parents get choked up watch Friday Night Lights get choked up eat something and look at your ceiling til you fall asleep.
Basically, congratulations are in order, everything. You really did it! You exist! No one can tell you you don’t, unless it’s a philosophy major with a braided ponytail or perhaps a wispy mustache. Even then, you could probably refute it easily or cut off the ponytail when no one was looking. It’s a strange thing, everything, but as you go about your lives, just remember three things: dumb people have the best sex because they think the least, fast food in small amounts won’t do anything except make your vegan friends judge you, and people who like Manhattan more than Annie Hall aren’t to be trusted.
Sincerely,
Someone