THIS IS ANOTHER ONE OF THE LETTERS/WRITINGS MY BROTHER WROTE FOR ME, BUT I NEVER RECEIVED.  IT WAS AMONGST HIS DIARIES AND OTHER DOCUMENTS I FOUND AFTER HIS DEATH, HE HAD WRITTEN “UNSENT” ON IT. IT IS DATED 22 JUN 1994 .

Dear Sis,

What an absolutely crap day I’m having, so crap in fact, that I felt it simply had to be shared.  I just had lunch over the road, the usual collection of twenty-something’s from work, and for some reason, between the office and the bistro, I have appropriated for myself an incredibly shitty mood.  One of those moods where you just want to pout all day.  Maybe my moods are moving in sympathy with the weather.  It’s bitingly cold here, and there’s this draught on the back of my neck which I have never noticed until Monday after my hair had been shorn.  Yes, I cut it again, this time its shaved at the back and sort of longish at the front.  Everyone else seems to love it, I’m not so sure myself.  Well anyway, this new coiffure has exposed the tender regions of the back of my neck to this marauding breeze and its pissing me off no end.  To top it all off, my newly exposed ears are copping a beating too.  And lunch was crap.  All round it’s been a generally shitty day, and the forecast is for a bit more shittiness followed by a cold front of irritability.

So how are you coping in the Post-Mum era of domesticity?  She’ll back for cousin Louise’s wedding in Queensland.  I can’t go myself, too busy at work.  I’ve been putting in six day weeks for the past nine weeks running.  I’ve got nothing else to do anyway really, I just sit at home and read if I don’t come in to work, which is good because it means I’ve done a lot more reading in the past two months I have in the past two years.  I’ve been so lazy, and it doesn’t help when none of your friends have picked up a book since they left school.  I can see now that I really had nothing in common with any of my friends but the copious consumption of alcohol – something I’m not terribly interested in anymore – and hence I don’t really see any of them anymore.  I’m just in a completely negative mood and everything is pissing me off; my job, my friends (or lack thereof), my appearance, the whole fucking lot.  I have these visions of me years from now, ensconced in my house, surrounded by books and befriended field mice and imaginary Icemen from the Land of Fwark, and little children pass the fount of the house and whisper behind their hands “That’s where old man J lives.  He’s crazy as a coot, and eats all the alley cats and runaway kids.”  Fuck, I’m writing absolute shit.  I seem to have lost the knack for writing letters.  I guess this will join the ranks of all the other unsent letters and squandered time.