A Handwritten Note

Yesterday was Saturday. And it’s a long weekend with Labor Day and all that. Not that it matters in the great old United States of America.

Holidays are for working if you are of the working class. Somebody has to sell the shit that the people who are not working are buying.

Somebody has to go to the store and represent for all of those “Labor Day Sales” and other garbage.

I try not to take out any anger on those who are simply “doing their job” because that’s all most of use our doing.

But the government does not work.

And on a Saturday, I walk my dog to the mailbox and get the mail. It won’t be coming again until Tuesday. Who is going to get my junk mail to me?

Regardless, my wife and I have decided to explore selling our house to transition into a home which is more suited for a couple of old people. A larger closet, a better master bathroom, and a fenced yard which does not have a fence I built.

The dogs need to run and after ten years of living here, we decided to finish the fence so we could just let the dogs free. My wife got a quote to finish the fence and it came in at $3,000.

For 15 feet of fence.

Fucking capitalism.

So we dropped about $500 and I did the work.

I kept hearing my mother’s boyfriend as I was doing the work. He does this kind of stuff for a living and the last time he was over he complained out loud that the flooring my wife installed was not very good and he would never install it in a home he was working on.

He never spends his own money. And this is key.

And it actually looks good.

Unlike my fence.

My fence keeps the dogs in. I built a gate. I secured everything. And it looks like shit. And I wouldn’t care if we were staying.

We were staying when I built it.

I can hear my mom’s boyfriend bitch about how bad it looks now.

I’m drowning the voices in my head with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

We check the mail. And in the mailbox are two things.

Something for my oldest who has excommunicated me.

And a handwritten note.

The note is from the realtor I contacted last week to sell my home.

The realtor asked me if I needed a first floor master bedroom. My response was, I’m not that old.

Fuck, I do not plan to be that old.

A handwritten note is generally a nice gesture, but this one was peculiar. The address had a couple of letters scribbled out. He’s looking to pull in $15,000 from me and didn’t bother to start a new envelop. Just scribbled out the letters he fucked up and kept going.

Then there was the note itself.

I got the dog back into the house and opened the back door so he could run around in my atrociously fenced in yard, but he never does. He sticks to my side.

The puppy. Now she runs in the backyard all the time. She chills back there. And I take comfort in the fact she cannot run away. She just barks at the bunnies, the frogs, the raccoons, and the geese she sees.

This handwritten note sent to my home as a good gesture came across like a first grader told to write to his pen pal. Like an assignment to interact with kids across the world as a good gesture. From a teacher who knows another language and thought it would be fun to interact with kids who natively speak the language she learned as part of her college credits.

But…

Receive was misspelled.

His signature looked like he was merely practicing cursive but never had a reason to use it.

And I feel bad, but the guy is trying to get my business and does not know i before e except after c. This guy just started trying to write in cursive yesterday.

This is a major fucking purchase and I have a first grader trying to take 3%. Fuck all of that.

No periods. No commas. Just filler as a “nice gesture” which would have been better had he not done it.

I cancelled my meeting with this agent immediately.

A handwritten note is a nice gesture. I’m not going to say it is not, but fuck, I am not interested in giving a first grader 3% of my house’s value. Which is certainly less than I think it is because of the flooring and the ugly fence.

It’s Labor Day Weekend and there are some very important baseball games because September. The weather is cooling down. I have ten years of shit in my house, my kids are moving out which leaves me and my wife to learn about each other again, and it seems a first grader is sending me handwritten notes.

I think to myself, I’m smart enough to do all this shit this kid is doing and get paid better than I am.

Sometimes I wonder what went wrong, but it’s more important I accept that I am where I am at and try to move on.

Don’t be afraid to move on.

I wish my kid would learn that lesson. Move forward.

And don’t write notes like a first grade pen pal.

Simple.

But we are who we are.