A Letter to Maysam
June 21, 2025
Noon
Dear Maysam,
It’s been almost six weeks since I began my involuntary servitude and incarceration at the retirement home. It’s real name is Excelsior Villa, but I call it The Village. Sally is a harsh taskmaster. She has me chained to the heavy metal frame of our waterbed and demands that we have sex at least six times a day. Which would be hard enough, so to speak, but my girlfriend, Sadie, insists on trysting with me two or three times daily, when Sally is out with her alcoholic friends, enjoying 4-martini lunches and other debauchery. The physical demands on me are so great that I now consume at least 12,000 calories a day, like a mountain climber scaling Everest or something. Still, I feel lightheaded–low blood sugar, probably. Lemme grab an energy bar.
How are things with you in Tehran? The old man was on the news today, bragging about bombing Iran back to the stoneage. What an arsehole. I’ve taken to Twitter (X) and have been giving him what for. Oops! I just heard the door. Sally is back home; she’s singing German drinking songs, for Chrissake! Gotta go. I’ll email you again later.
Duke
June 21 2025
12:05pm
Hi Maysam,
Sorry to keep you, but Sally had “an itch,” she said. It took longer than usual this time. She brought me my dinner: white hominey and boiled chicken. Ugh! She told me she’s going to release me for a while on Thursday night but I better be on my best behavior. She’ll have a taser, she warned. She wants to take me to a communal supper here at The Village. Sally is entered into a chili competition, but it doesn’t bode well. She makes an incredible glop she calls bison-head chili. She plops a full-size, 60-lb. bison head, fur and horns and all, into a 10-gallon stock pot and cooks it to death. Then she adds tomatoes and beans and onions and all the rest, and she calls this chili. I hope she doesn’t make me eat it. It’s not fit for man nor beast. I’ll write you again in a few days, Maysam. I hear Sally again–gulp!
Duke
June 23, 2025
10:32am
Hello again, Maysam,
Well, the chili supper was a fiasco. Not only did the apartment reek from the simmering bison head all day and all night, but another resident–that’s what we’re called, residents–made bison head chili as well. Sally got so pissed that she secretly emptied a large bottle of Geritol into the other woman’s concoction and everyone got the runs. Oy veh!
How is your writing coming along? I subbed to a newly “literary” rag that once deigned to publish me, but now has an acceptance rate of <1%. Miserable shitheels! I subbed them my much-acclaimed story, the old reliable “Brainy Bike,” you know, the one about the dipshit actuary from the future that buys an AI motorcycle. Well, the publisher, Charlie Fishface, turned his snooty nose up at my creation. But I fixed him: I learned the location of his office in the UK, and I hired a guy to ring his doorbell and run. Gotta go: Sadie just peeped her pretty blonde head in through my window. Luckily, I saved a bottle of that peach vodka.
Duke
July 25, 2025
10:06aj
Good morning, Maysam (I guess it’s evening where you’re at),
Sally decided that my drinking had gotten out of control, so she sent me to AA. But, because she said she can’t trust me to be out and about amongst hoi polloi, she instead purchased some AA videos which she instructed me to watch on the flatscreen TV in our bedroom while I’m chained to the bed.
I thought, what the hell, I’d give it a shot, and so I turned it on. It was a talk given by the Reverend Over Berring, some evangelical televangelist and was he ever full of shit. He had a 13-step program. I know, you’re gonna say that AA is a 12-step program. But Berring’s program had an additional step, which is to send him money.
They had a “counseling” number on the screen and when I called, they insisted that I give them my credit card number, the card’s expiration date and the three-digit security code on the back of the card. I told the girl who answered the phone that she could go fork herself and went off on her for ten minutes before I realized she was a bot. Somehow, through our telephone connection, she managed to get the info she wanted and now I’m in for $100 a week. Yikes! I don’t know what I’m going to tell Sally. Hold on, I hear her footsteps down the hall. I’ll get back to you.
Duke
July 25, 2025
11:00am
Hi again,
Sally got our American Express bill and I had to confess. As punishment, she took away my telephone privileges. Which is shortsighted, really: the Reverend Over Berring is on the internet too. Maybe next time she’ll break my fingers so that I can’t punch the computer keys. I’ll talk at you later, my friend.
Duke
August 15 2025
1:00pm
Dear Maysam,
I’m worried about Sally. She hasn’t been nearly as affectionate as she was before; I think she’s taken another lover! It’s not like I can follow after her, since she’s still got me chained to this blasted bed. So what I did was, I hired a PI to chase her down. I got the first report in my inbox today. The detective wrote that Sally has been spending a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, a garish resort in W. Palm Beach, a community about 20 miles East of The Village. This comes as a great surprise. What could be up? Maybe Sally has taken up golf. I’ll contact you when I hear more.
Duke
Feb. 11, 2026
11:15am
Greetings, Maysam,
Sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long, my friend, but there has been a lot going on. Basically, I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news first: Sally was in fact having an affair. The good news: it wasn’t with a man. No, wait, let me back up. I didn’t mean that. I meant that it wasn’t with a human being. That doesn’t sound much better, does it? Let me start over: Sally was having AI sex.
I asked Sally how I could possibly compete with an AI lover and she said I virtually couldn’t. Ha-ha. Sally’s a pippen. Well, it sounded funnier when she said it. So now Sally’s heart is devoted to another. And while I’m not getting the physical workout I once did, I keep eating the huge meals I had consumed before. To make a bad situation worse, my paramour, Sadie, found a boy her own age. Did I mention she was 19? As a result, I’ve ballooned from my svelte 166 lbs. to more than 600.
Sally no longer has to chain me to our bed, because I can’t fit through the bedroom door. Sally didn’t seem to mind my enlarged girth, however, since she’d moved into the guest room, which she shares with Alexa. I decided to take matters into my own hands and contracted for a liposuction procedure. I contacted a company off the internet that had a good reputation. But when they arrived, it was this old guy in a Spiderman costume, wheeling in a Craftsman 16-gallon Shop Vac, and I threw them out.
I don’t know what to do, Maysam. I hardly see my wife, except when she delivers my meals. She’s always been a remarkable cook, and she seems to have found the most succulent, delicious, fattening meals out there. I keep gaining weight. I think my wife’s trying to kill me, Maysam.
Duke
March 2, 2026
(The clock on my PC is broken)
Dear Maysam,
I feel rather odd writing this message, Maysam. First of all, I want to genuinely thank you for letting me capitalize on your generous nature and use you as a sounding board. I can’t tell you what it’s meant for me to have someone I could communicate with. Although we’ve never met in person and live thousands of miles apart, I feel I know you like a brother. You are my best friend, Maysam.
I was rather disquieting to hear from your sister that you had in fact passed away some nine months ago, succumbing to the violence rained down by American bombers. I am profoundly sorry you are deceased, Maysam. I hope this will not stand in the way of our future communications. Talk to you soon.
As always,
Duke