Let’s get right down to business: I want to hire you to write my obituary.
Oh, I know, I’m not dead yet, but based on the number of empty beer bottles and cigarette packs I trash every day, the local garbage haulers tell me that, based on their over-under numbers, the smart money’s on planning ahead for this kind of thing. Besides, I’m not 20 anymore, and I’m old enough to realize that “Covered in his own vomit” is a pretty shitty epitaph. And frankly, I’ve seen your work in the Pat Tillman incident, and I’m willing to pay serious coin to get the best ghostwriter in this morbid little business to make sure that when I go, I look good.
The way I see it, your strength is that you don’t seem to tell out-and-out lies; you just gloss over some of the uglier details and put a shine on the best details of a situation. Which is exactly what I’m looking for. If I wanted someone to tell lies about me, I’d bring in my old buddy and wingman Ken MacDonald, who once told a girl in a bar that not only was I worth millions from my invention of American Sign Language, but that my semen tasted like Bananas Foster and cured glaucoma.
No, I’m looking for someone who can look at a colossal fuck-up and gently spin it into an ABC Movie of the Week, and clearly you’re the man for the job. As a fer-instance, take that time I staggered into the street after last call, tripped off the curb, fell in front of a speeding cab and muttered that I wanted a Denny’s Grand Slam so I wouldn’t have to be hospitalized, all while the cabbie shrieked at me in Ubangi. Maybe you could polish that turd into a story about how I stopped an act of potential foreign terrorism while snarling, “Tonight, we dine in hell!”
I don’t want to tell you your business, but you could maybe take that time I knocked back most of a quart of Stoli so my friends wouldn’t get their hands on it and wound up getting my stomach pumped, and turn it into, “He prevented a Communist chemical weapons attack, saving countless lives and sustaining only minor injuries.”
Now, I recognize that you’ve done most of your best work for the Bush Administration (even though it seems to be uncredited), and I don’t want to take you too far outside of your comfort zone. So I guess you could take the story about the time I ate at Aujourd’hui (Which I can’t remember, but this wildly inaccurate and libelous account supposedly gets the gist of it) and spin it as, “Rob acted as a virtual ambassador to the French people, trying to introduce them to American culture, and was cruelly rebuffed for his efforts, which is why the French can’t be trusted as our partners in the War on Terror.”
Also, I’d like to be credited as saying “Let’s roll” (Which I did; no one needs to know that it was because the guy was asleep at a bus stop and I needed cab fare) and as having accomplished something “singlehandedly” (Also technically true, since I’m about T minus 75 words away from surfing for porn).
I guess that about covers it. Please reply as soon as possible; I am willing to pay almost any price to retain the services of a distinguished General such as yourself.
Wait – what do you mean, a fucking Major General? Fine: I’ll give you whatever you can find in my car’s ashtray and a case of PBRs. That’s a handful of ashy change and twelve tallboys more than I offered MacDonald. Take it or leave it.
[tags]Pat Tillman, General Phillip Kensinger, Donald Rumsfeld, friendly fire, cover-up, dark humor, satire[/tags]
