“The longer your paragraph,
the shorter your penis [gets].”

After the bath (that proceeded rather slowly because I was paying more attention to reading you than bathing myself), I carried you back to my room (and my mother’s too, I musn’t forget) and splayed you out on top of my clothes box and read you while I dressed. Judy can write a storm, really! I wish I had her wits. And Ms. Jean Webster’s too!

After I dressed, I took you with me while I ate my breakfast and tried reading along until my mother scolded me for “mixing up priorities”. She said I should eat when I should eat and read later. My mother’s so old-fashioned like you Daddy dear. But you are more entertaining. My mother is, some times, when she’s not worrying about things she shouldn’t really worry about. So I told her, I can do two things at once. I have my mouth to mind my eating and my eyes to mind my reading and I have two hands to do service to each of the two principal senses I was using to do two tasks at once. You ought to know, Daddy, that’s how it is these days. Better if you can do a lot of things at once. We call it multi-tasking. It makes the world revolve faster as much as we like to think. That’s what you think when you are “modern”.

Anyway, it’s not only the modern people doing a lot of things at once these days. Even the things Daddy! You should try our coffee. In the 20th century, we made coffee “instant”. In the 21st century, we gave it various properties so that it cannot only be just “instant” but also be creamy and sugary. We call it the 3-in-1 coffee because it’s instant coffee mixed with cream and sugar so you wouldn’t have to make your own crude estimations of cream and  sugar and make your coffee undrinkable. Then we upgraded “3-in-1 coffee” to “5-in-1″ coffee”. This upgraded coffee has healthy properties along with the usual cream, sugar, and coffee. But still there are lots of possibilities! Somewhere out there, a new coffee product mixed the properties of tea is being made and sold. Perhaps, in the future coffee can also taste like orange juice. See Daddy, if you had lived in my time, you would have a grand time finding both delight and disgust with all these modern concoctions.

But modern times do get tiring. That’s why I found you engrossing. Your times, though already modern, had the smell of a fresh bud opening up. Perhaps, it was all because of Judy and her tellings of her fresh start in life, in college away from the dreadful John Grier Home. It is always enlivening to discover and do new things.If I could just begin my college life again or my whole life in school I would have made a better progress in life. The dissatisfaction of the 21st century! The case of another miserable youth! What tragedy! I am moved to think I am a gift to the human race turned languid and sour. If I could just sicken and die.

But don’t you think there’s hope Daddy? In my deepest, darkest pit of a self, I think there is a tunnel of light my slow, creaky train can pass through. In the meantime, I just have to chug along.

I hope I have not bored you Daddy, with my juvenile misery (I may be in my 20s but I can never grow out of being sixteen). I am really a sunny person but I can’t always keep at it, naturally. Sunny personalities eventually retire like the sun every afternoon. But before that, I can be awfully bright. That morning when I finished you, I was.

Yours in brightness,
21st century Judy

See yah Heath!

                                                                                            — Robert Gibson.

-BOB MARLEY