57. Monkeys

Dear monkeys,

I love you. The idea of you even more than the reality— as much as I dig furry nonhuman primates and the way you're like people, only more so, I haven't gotten around to studying you obsessively like I did with dinosaurs when I was six. But I still think you're awesome, and not just because you're almost always funny.

Monkeys, I think my love for you goes all the way back to the Pippi Longstocking books. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's all kinds of things to love about Pippi but her very own monkey pal Mr. Nilsson is a good place to start. And so my brother and I would play at being Pippi and Mr. Nilsson, and he's pretty much been my monkey friend ever since. We forgot about it for awhile when I was busy trying to be cool as a teenager, but fortunately the Muppets came to the rescue with the Tony Bennett episode of Muppets Tonight. For some reason that I can't remember anymore, lounge singer Johnny Fiama gets upset with his helper chimp Sal, and it takes most of the episode and Tony's intervention (musical, of course) to bring the two of them back together. But in the end, all is well. "Who's my little stinky monkey?" Johnny asks, and Sal replies, "I am." And my brother and I have been saying this to each other ever since.

I can point to countless other pop culture monkeys that have helped your species — or more accurately, suborder/infraorder — maintain great power in my heart and mind, but two fictional examples are probably enough. Besides, I also have two anecdotes from my real life that illustrate your deep importance to me. First there was the time my friends Steve and Dan were arguing about evolution. Steve, a big fan of Inherit the Wind, was writing a major research paper on evolution vs. creationism, with an eye towards analyzing the Scopes Monkey Trial. Dan, a rabid atheist, decided to play Devil's Advocate against him for fun, and the argument lasted for weeks until Steve "won" by shouting:

"Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey! Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey! Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey...."

...and Dan had to stop ranting and laugh. The debate was over, and Steve had taken enough notes to lay the foundation for a really bitchin' paper. The moral of the story is: if an argument outlives its fun, to avoid comparing an opponent to Hitler (as we all know, the ultimate rhetorical foul), call on the monkeys to save the day.

But you're not always fun and games, are you, monkeys? I found that out the hard way the time you almost cost me a job. I'd barely started in the hippie natural foods store kitchen when a coworker handed me a marker and suggested I draw something on the wall to celebrate his last day. I drew a monkey, with the ever-original caption, "Ook! Ack!" The next day, the kitchen manager saw my harmless, reversible prank as an act of mutiny, and left a page-long paranoid rant about vandalism and disrespect in the kitchen journal. My coworkers assured me that he'd been plenty unpopular before, but I still felt terrible. So I called him at home to apologize, and stunned him into silence before I could even offer to resign if that was the right thing to do. To this day no one knows how much the so-called "monkey incident" had to do with it, but he quit a few days later and my drawing (by then mostly erased) was hailed as a symbol of liberation. I never really lived it down, to the point where people would hand me markers and gesture at walls when they were unhappy with later bosses. My point is: monkeys, you are powerful stuff.

For all these stories and more, monkeys, I cannot thank you enough. Now and forever, I raise my (usually metaphorical) banana to you and all the joy you bring: Cheers.

Love,
-Tracy

44. Compassion

Dear compassion,

When did you infect my brain?

Um, I write that like it's a bad thing, but really it's not. I just don't have a better way to express my surprise at the weird-but-good ways in which you manifest in my life — for instance, the event that inspired me to write this letter.

I was riding to work in the bike lane along a busy street, when a big, scary dog — a Rottweiler maybe? something bred to kill — lunged at me from the back of a parked truck, where it was tied up. I swerved, managed to stay out of traffic, was relieved to see that the dog couldn't reach me, and my next thought — a split second after "holy fucking shit run away watch out for cars" and "it's okay, it's chained up, I'm safe" — was "oh, that poor animal." Being tied up in the back of a truck next to a busy street with cars whipping by is not my idea of a good time. But that thought, that reflexive moment of empathy, completely overwhelmed my fight-or-flight response. I rode on in a daze, suddenly oblivious to the adrenaline coursing through my veins, marveling that I could go from "it's gonna kill me!" to "poor doggy" in far less time than it takes me to put those thoughts into words. That was when I started thinking about writing you.

Sometimes I feel like you and your friend, kindness, are in short supply in this world, compassion, and I know I'm often part of the problem. So it's okay if you've infected my heart, or my brain stem or whatever involuntary nerve cluster reacts even faster than my oh-so-verbal mind. For one thing, as stupid and clichéd as it may be to say, experiencing you makes me feel better about myself as a person, even if I'm frequently startled to find myself possessed by the better angels of my nature, so to speak. It's even oddly appropriate that I can't write you very articulately, since those possessions seem to be faster than the speed of words. Go ahead and grow inside me, compassion, not like a tumor but like an immunity to the ways in which I'm brought down by the world when the people in it suck. And please, feel free to replace that part of my brain that made me fill this letter with so many adverbs. Thank you for everything, especially good things to come.

Love,
-Tracy

Published 26 February 2007, title abridged 1 December 2011

32. Mad Cow Disease

Dear mad cow disease,

I love you. Not just for your name, although it is fabulous, and not just for the beautiful poetic irony of your very existence. Seriously, thank you for pointing out the almost mind-numbingly obvious fact that maybe forced cannibalism is a bad thing, especially for herbivores, and even more so when those herbivores are livestock that's intended to be slaughtered for eating... seriously. It's pretty much impossible to write to you without snickering a little.

Speaking of snickering, I love you despite the fact that people's fear of you leads me into stupid conversations like the one I had at work today with a woman who won't buy our macaroni and cheese because it's made with cheddar that comes from England, home of the original cases of mad cow disease in humans if you don't count all the cannibals who've gotten it throughout history. I mean, good lord. You're awesome and all, mad cow, but the prions thought to cause you are still found mostly in brain and nerve tissue and only very occasionally in muscles and so the odds of them turning up in milk are pretty miniscule, right? I'm going to do more research just to make sure I'm not being some kind of crazy Pollyanna optimist, but really. Like I told the well-meaning lady at the hippie grocery store today, if prions are getting into milk, we have bigger problems than you, mad cow disease. (And it's not like you're only happening in England, but it's probably a good thing I didn't remember to mention that this afternoon, because there was enough to worry about in that conversation as it was.) Anyway. I can understand prions getting into ground beef, because slaughterhouses are basically sweatshops and mistakes are hard to prevent even under humane working conditions, but I don't want to imagine what the hell kind of dairy could slaughter a cow while milking it, and in such a splattery way as to get brains in the milk. There's a whole new book of kosher rules to be written about that problem, I tell you what.

But back to my love for you, which is also not just because prions are awesome in the good old-fashioned fear- and awe-inspiring kind of way. I mean, proteins gone wild! That's terrifying and beautiful and pretty much completely beyond my comprehension to the point where I give up and revert to making sand castles — oh wait, that's the ocean, but it's similarly huge and amazing and I mean the analogy as a sincere compliment to you both. I love you for a combination of these reasons and more, mad cow disease, like how I could have you and not even know it, so I'd better hurry up and write these and all my other letters because my brain could sprout holes and turn even spongier than usual any day now if you've been incubating in there for years. Sometimes I worry that humanity is going to destroy itself by something as crass and boring as war or pollution, and then something like you happens, and I realize that I haven't even begun to think of all the ways the universe could easily help us along to our demise by using our own incredible stupidity against us. And that's a grim thing to laugh at, sure, but I don't know how else to respond. So thanks again for being one of my very favorite dark jokes, mad cow disease.

Love,
-Tracy

Started 8 March 2006, published 13 May 2006. Title abridged 1 December 2011, last updated 6 June 2014.

19. FreeCycle

Dear FreeCycle,

Please stop sending me offers of kittens, especially ones with pictures. I want them all, and my Iggy Pop probably does too, but I hope I'm still several decades away from turning into a crazy cat lady, so yeah. In the meantime, if you could just remind everybody to spay and neuter their pets, that would be great. Thanks!

Love,
-Tracy

published on Epistolography on 22 September 2005, title abridged 1 December 2011.

4. Dogs

Dear dogs,

I know you can't read this, but would you please stop shitting in my yard? I want to turn it into a garden someday, and I'd really like to grow edible food in it, so yeah. Quit it already!

And while I'm dreaming, if you could please tell your people that it might be better to take you out for a walk, like for instance to the dog park less than half a mile north of my house, instead of just letting you out at night to roam the streets unsupervised, so you're completely free to shit in my yard because you couldn't read a "no pooping" sign even if I posted one? That would be great.

Love,
-Tracy

Started 8 November 2004, last updated 19 January 2005