In this mail bag you’ll hear a letter about the afterlife, a spooky postcard and a letter to best Max I know!
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- Letter Talk is written and produced by me, and my sister Amy edits my writing. This episode features music from Kevin MacLeod.
Read the letters after the jump!
Letters
Dear John Edward,
I made sure to double and triple check this note to make sure I was sending it to the famous medium John Edward and not the famous politician and adulterer John Edwards. “What a difference an ‘S’ makes!” I’m sure Harry S Truman would scream in delight. I’m sure you know that the “S” in “Harry S Truman” doesn’t stand for shit or anything else for that matter. That was “a fun fact” my dad told me after he read a book about Truman. In retrospect, I should have corrected him and said it was only “a fact.”
I’m sure in your head you have all sorts of dead folks’ voices, and I’m sure while reading that you were pretty impressed with my ability to tell you what Harry S Truman is saying. So maybe, I’m the psychic here, too! Alright you got me, I’m not, but I feel like I had you going there.
I figured since you can talk to the dead, you’d be able to get some information for me. Can you get in touch with someone in the afterlife (preferably a good one, baddies creep me out!), and ask them this: in the afterlife do you end up as old as you are when you died, or are you in the shape you were in in your best years? If you end up in heaven and everybody is the age they are when they died, I feel like the landscape would be mostly bingo halls and Medicare seminars. If you get to be there as the age you were in your prime, does that mean that when I die someday me and my dad and my grandma will all be hanging out and we’re all 30ish?
Honestly thinking about this is a bit exhausting and I’m starting to understand why people throw their hands in the air, give up, and scream, “I’m an atheist now!”
I tend to think that when you get to the end, it would be one of two things:
- A black screen, like at the end of the Sopranos. That’s all we have, and that’s why it makes sense to do a good job and be a good person, because you can’t fix that shit in post.
- Maybe the afterlife is solipsistic in that we create a reality that we want to live in for eternity and other realities may or may not fit with our vision because we recreate all our loved ones the way we want them. Essentially option #2 isn’t necessarily connected with the thoughts and visions of others. And this makes sense to me only because I feel like heaven wouldn’t have all those wacky fucks I don’t want to see, but aren’t necessarily awful enough to burn in hell for all eternity. There’s probably a lot of friends of friends there, because, as my sister says, “Oh man, friends of friends are the worst!”
Please keep me posted on what you find. I’m assuming you’ll have plenty of time to prepare because you probably already know this letter is coming.
XOXO,
Alyssa
***
Hey Andy! If you don’t believe ghosts are real, then who moved my furniture and ate all my blue cheese? I’m a citizen and I demand answers!
Sincerely,
Alyssa
Hi Max,
First of all, sorry I got mixed up and thought that Kevin and Barack Obama left the Apple Podcasts review that you clearly worked so hard on. What really threw me off was your use of exclamation points — which I associate with Kevin, probably because he speaks in exclamations. Anyway, this letter isn’t supposed to be about our mutual friend Kevin, or why we seem to know a lot of people named Kevin, this is about Max! And the fact that we know fewer Maxes … Max’s. Hey Max, since we’re here talking about it, how do you pluralize “Max”? Please let me know … and if you don’t know, could you please bring it up in your next Max Meeting? I just assume folks named Max all have a conference call periodically to discuss issues in the Max community.
You wrote me a note saying, “right now I am very hungry and I’m wondering about how they say you eat 8 spiders a year in your sleep – if I just ate 10 spiders today do you think the other spiders would know, or would I just end up with a lot more ‘ders in my gullet?” Honestly I think that if you ate 10 spiders, the other ‘ders would start talking. Word travels fast in the ‘ders community, sort of like it does in the Max community. I’m sure all the spiders would be posting about you in the Spider Next Door App, saying you’re a hazard because you keep eating them and all the neighbor spiders will argue about what to do about you.
If I had access to the Spider Next Door App I would definitely defend you. I would say, “Max is a super great guy. He’s a very funny human, who happens to also be very nice and a good person.” I feel like that is already an impressive feat: being a funny comedian, very nice and a good person … that’s harder to come by than folks would think. Usually, in that triangle of qualities you get to keep one or two of those and replace the rest with drinking problems.
Max, despite what the trash talking spiders on the Spider Next Door App are saying, you’re super cool, and you’re one of the comics in DC I miss seeing perform on a regular basis. I hope things are going swimmingly, and I hope that you’ve been able to solve your hunger problem without resorting to eating those delicious eight legged treats.
Cheers,
Alyssa