May 9, 2026
Dear Aunt Aggie,
It’s not that I don’t want Uncle Stan here, or anything like that. It’s more like I’d prefer he not make the effort – and there are several reasons for this that I must insist are cogent and rational, and therefore also logical.
FIRST, there is a very good chance that we may all just die here. They’ve been bombing us relentlessly, to the point where basic infrastructure, necessary for even the crudest sustenance and subsistence, has been all but completely destroyed.
SECOND: The main reason Uncle Stan wants to come out here – namely, to try to coax me out of this hallucinatory hellhole and get me to come back home (this IS my home!) – will be time, money, and effort futilely spent, aye, wasted; and has nothing to do with that I simply can’t stand the sight of Uncle Stan and would be reviled and disgusted to have him here…
You must know that’s not true. I have always had a great and deep admiration for Uncle Stan, all other things considered.
But and because it is another thing altogether, for which I cannot be blamed, nephew or not, of truly being revolted at having to tolerate his company when he drinks, which is often, and then forced to witness his grotesque and gruesome feats of freakishly prodigious strength, truly frightening though I admit them to be. With the delirium, howling, growling, roaring, and stink of it all that perforce come with these uncontrolled demonstrations (of I don’t of what: Uncle Stan’s latent insanity, rendered manifest through alcohol?), how can that possibly translate into my having some kind of fondness for such repeated ordeals, much less tolerance.
Which brings me to THIRD: As I’ve already told you, Auntie, the first time I was supposed to see Uncle Stan [see Ap 3/KC 369 Zippy Z and the Man-in-the-Box, the latter section starting “Kilo Charlie-12, Code Five”] – in May of 2017, to be exact, and still well before the outbreak of the larger war across Ukraine – instead of getting a message, or some indication, from Uncle Stan that he was here and ready and eager to meet me, on Friday, May 12, I came into the offices of The Curmudgeon, where I was working as a journalist at the time, only to pick up and read in my own paper a story filed by another reporter, based on eyewitness accounts and a local police report, about a “madman” who’d turned over a squad car in the area the night before. That report went on to connect the same abominable individual to a string of apartment break-ins and refrigerator raids that very night.
An even more detailed and colorfully descriptive account of the surreal and bizarre events of that notorious night before, filed by the Kyiv-based American detective agency I told you about on the Kyiv Unedited website, convinced me beyond a doubt that Uncle Stan had hit town – hit it, all right, on a raging drunk, leaving overturned cars, vans, small trucks, and untold property damage, both public and private, in the wake of what turned out to be a ceaseless and unstoppable half-month-long rampage, none of which Uncle Stan claims to remember, because and countering that while he’d certainly planned out the trip, he’d never actually made it over, due to unforeseen money-related complications that came up stateside precisely at the time in question.
That, Aunt Aggie, had all been nerve-racking enough; but today, in the war-torn conditions I presently live, I don’t look forward to adding fevered attacks of anxiety to my already cursed sleep thinking about Uncle Stan coming over here only to find out that he’s again gotten entangled in the herculean manufactures of his own preposterous debauches and, under the present circumstances, this time killed as a result. After all, he’s not getting any younger, and the war’s not getting any more cultured.
Well, gotta run! Thanks for the chocolates and cookies!
Yours, ever,
Steve
***
May 15, 2026
Hey, Gattie,
Amazing you somehow managed to put that call in to me (using your 1970s landline technology, and Western Electric rotary telephone you inherited from our parents, no doubt breaking a sweat the whole time) to let me know Stevie’s latest hysterical thoughts on my imminent trip to Kiev to visit him.
I guess you thought it was enough of an emergency, as you stuttered out his objections (otherwise speaking normally, without trying to use all those big stupid words you’ve recently learned, clearly, because you don’t know how to do it in real human speech), that you felt forced to make the call because I wasn’t answering your emails on the matter.
Well, thanks for that, but since you’ve written to me yet again regarding the matter, I resentfully feel forced to write you back, using up precious minutes of my Friday evening and therefore weekend, as you seem unable to handle any human communication that isn’t written down.
Although maybe I shouldn’t complain so much, huh? After all, it was a Labor of Hercules to finally get you to start using email! At least now I’m not wasting time driving miles out of my way to the nearest post office to drop off my painstakingly handwritten replies, including paying for postage, not to mention gas. Yes, I didn’t type them up (for your “reading convenience”) because I didn’t want to waste even more money needlessly using up my printer ink cartridges, which I need for my work.
But since I’m on the matter, this completely useless writing exercise you always force me into because of your incomprehensible and irrational glossophobia (I’m your brother, for crying out loud!), I’ll just go ahead and blast out the topmost thoughts in my mind on the subject – before, that is, getting to the point of this letter.
I know you’re at home, but whenever I try to call you, you never answer the phone – your fear of the thing is frankly uncanny. Like in some cheap Hitchcockian knockoff horror flick from the 60s. When it rings, do you stare at it in terror (I know it’s black, which probably helps give the object that scary and unnerving Poesque vibe – ooo… ooo-ooo… ooo-ooo-ooooo…), and then every ring gets louder and louder, until you put your hands over your ears and start to scream?! Maybe you get a little secret thrill indulging such worn-out tropes? Maybe you feel like you’re starring in one of those films? What’s the problem? Just pick up the phone, already! Are you a little child?!
And I know you know it’s me, because I let it ring four times, hang up, and then I let it ring six times, hang up, and then four more times on the third try before I give up. You don’t even have the decency to get up the gumption to call me back, and I’m your own brother! You’re so scared of the thing, you have refused to get yourself even the simplest mobile communications device; at least I’d be able to send you texts you could read, if you’re so afraid of picking up the receiver and having a real modern-day conversation. And then you could even text me back! How about that?!
My God, ma’am!
But, to get back to the point, you can tell our Stevie that it doesn’t matter what he says, I’m coming over to visit him, and that’s that. It’s only a question of getting the funds together to do it. As you know, I’m not writing Stevie about it, because he only gets more unreasonably upset in response to me than when he talks to you. Although, with that war he’s living in, maybe I don’t much blame him.
Okay, take care,
Stan
Filed: Letters on File Officer, 2nd Asst. to the Vice-Manager of Records, KUSEB, 9.8.26