The Crooked and the Straight

Dear Dad,

I'm sorry, but every time I get an email from you it freaks me out a little. You'd think that I'd be used to it by now, us having the same name and all. I mean, how many years did we have to sort the mail? For a while it wasn't a problem: Bills--Dad. Highlights magazine--Me. But once I got into high school and college, it got a little stranger. But never that difficult.

Heck, we still have to put up with it. Like the time I got a call from GEICO asking me about an auto insurance claim that they said I made in Ohio? When I was living in Seattle? (By the way, they still seem to be confused about that, the poor bastards. I guess I still have some phone calls to make.)

Regardless, I still do a double-take when I get an email from you, though, because I always think it was something I had sent to myself (or CC:ed to myself or something)--because I do that kind of thing for perfectly understandable reasons of course--and I start reading it and I'm thinking to myself, "What the hell? I don't remember writing this at all!" And then I do this little mental dance to try and figure out if it's been a full moon recently or if I've been ingesting any strange potions from test tubes or sleeping in coffins and avoiding garlic. And then I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror to make sure I haven't lept into my body at some other point in time in my life because I'm here to set right something that once went wrong. Nope, no holographic womanziers around or anything.

Then about two or three sentences in, I've got it all figured out. "Ah ha!" I cry, usually just to myself in my head (but sometimes out loud...okay maybe usually out loud), "I'm not crazy!" And then I do a little yay-I'm-still-not-completely-insane dance. And then sometimes it starts raining. (I don't know why, but it might have something to do with the head dress or the voodoo effigies.)

Anyhow, I'm really glad that you're all hip to this email thing, Dad, but really--couldn't you just ring me instead?

Love,
--Joe
(your son Joe, not you, Joe)