DEAR NEMESIS

I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't feel that the situation demands extraordinary measures. If I didn't feel that a life was at stake.

Let me start with a quote from Immanuel Kant (which rhymes with 'bunt').

"Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law."

No, first, what I want to say...and I mean this sincerely, I really do...is that I hope you enjoyed the box of Granny Goodie's Mega-Choco N Pecan Delites you finished off at four this morning. As you know...as you well know... the cookies were an impulse purchase. Probably, when I think about it, your response to the broccoli. Forget the fact that they were meant to last for a week. My mistake was opening the box after dinner. It's easier for you if the box is already open, isn't it? It's just like breaking a fifty. 'Just one,' I thought, 'before the bath.' I recall with cinematic clarity very neatly opening that valise of a box, re-sealing it, placing it at the rear of the topmost shelf in the cupboard...eating with great care the one cookie. From a plate (only slightly larger than the cookie itself) at the kitchen table. With a fork and a knife. This would have been roughly an hour after dinner, shortly before 8pm. I washed and dried and cupboarded the plate and the utensils, napkined the crumbs from my lips, and drew my bath.

I'm curious: what's it like, as an adult, to snarf eleven jumbo cookies in one go, at the crack of dawn, naked as Pan? Rhetorical question.

The seasons have changed again. Bright summer has blended, like a smearing watercolor, into brown fall. Listen: it's raining as I write this...the deadening rain of October, seeding the ground with January. Rain sounds like a sizzle in summer, it sounds like frying onions, but in fall it just sounds like the small hard thud of weather. Summer is your season, isn't it? The heat is conducive to socklessness. Late nights and later mornings. Summer is the season of flip-flops and their lazy gait and the unhealthy accessory of an ice cream cone. Right? Summer and sloppy go hand in hand. You really take over, every year, at a certain temperature, don't you? I don't remember ever stepping on the cold fish of a used condom on the way to the bathroom for the first pee of the day...on Xmas. It's always in July.

The point I'm getting at. Summer is over, we're well into fall, and the white-haired CEO of winter, in his stratocumulus-colored limo, is coming to town. The squirrels are too busy with the serious business of stockpiling peanuts and cheese-doodles to waste time any longer with their lunatic games of tag, and are the squirrels that much more intelligent than you...than I...than us? It's time to get serious, and any 'situation' we plunge into now will be magnified in the most dramatic way by the harsh conditions of the season. No more casual (and discrete) walks through the park: we'll be stuck in visible cafes and restaurants. No more after-dinner makeouts followed by wistful parting kisses on the doorstep: icy rain at 11pm means someone will be spending the night. And what is it about a winter evening spent under the duvet with fairy lights blinking and a bottle by the bed that makes the idea of an unplanned pregnancy seem downright cozy to the murky strategies of the subconscious?

Please don't fuck up with the Paffenholzes.