Today's post is brought to you by the letter A

If I had a nickel for every time I heard "Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one," I could quit the prison work camp and live out my dream of being a bum who sits on the couch drinking Newcastles brought to me by my dwarf waiter and living from "Law and Order" rerun to "Law and Order" rerun on TV.

Some folks pass the day digging ditches, shoveling cow poo on a midwestern dairy farm, or crab fishing in Dutch Harbor, Alaska; I pass the day reading and editing letters to the editor in a senior-based community (that would be me – the editor. Can you believe I have a position of such authority? Yeah, me neither!). After reading a dozen or so each day it’s a wonder these folks don’t self-combust from their balled-up hate. Hell, maybe their little hate engines, fueled by early-bird dinner buffets, keep them going like blue-haired Energizer bunnies.

Some days I laugh at that their crazy conspiracies and half-brained (the other half is being sliced and diced by dementia, I’m sure) logic while wading through hip-deep grammatical errors that makes their points even murkier (and they say our English is bad. Some of these folks may as well be speaking in tongue clicks after reading reading their mangling of the English language). Other days there isn’t enough beer in Arizona to chase away the thoughts that these whackos who write in may be in the lane next to me as I drive home, likely packing heat. The happy balance are those days when I receive letters for publication that thanks Hal and Edna Jones for finding Harriett’s wallet, which she left in the Safeway shopping cart and didn’t realize it until she arrived home. God bless them for finding it, the writer says (God is big to the blue hairs, they have Him blessing everything from the green grass in neighborhood’s medians to the local grocery store stocking the shelf with their favorite diuretic).

But if you want to see me go editorial – much like going postal except we hurl computer equipment at passing golf carts – whine about me and the two prison guards I answer to cutting your precious words as if they came etched from some golden tablet.

We have guest columnists, which is really an unfortunate title because it gives these amateur Erma Bombecks (they have double the sass and twice as little talent) a head the size of a Lincoln Town Car. They fall into two categories: far left (religion should only be used in the bed room during kinky sex acts – they are liberals who lived in the ‘60s - as in “Oh God, yes!”) and far right (George W. Bush is the Messiah and all Muslims should be roasted on a spit in his name). There is no gray area, no demilitarized zone, and no soft underbelly for one side to scratch so both are happy. And within those two groups I have two styles of writers: 1) Their words are gifts to our little prison fish wrap and they should not be touched under any circumstances, the penalty being outed by said columnist to his/her neo-political blue-hair coalition; 2) The topics they plan to discuss in future columns are interesting, so much so that they like to keep me on the phone for 45 minutes while a mean dump screams to be released from my ass because they always call when I have a fire in the hole.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from Category 1/Style 1. I grant OpEd space – fancy prison fish wrap lingo for opinions/editorials – to a handful of these red asses who believe it’s their birth right to fill our one page of opinions with long-winded, nonsensical rantings about how the other side of the political spectrum is trampling on their cookies and pissing in their Cheerios. Never mind that our audience is seniors who have to power up magnifying glasses to read our fish wrap; glasses, by the way, big enough to burn their initials into Uranus if they hit the sun at just the right angle. Anyway, this e-mail was addressed to the columnist (we’ll call him Mr. Fathead Gasbag), obviously he didn’t want me to see who he rolls with, and huffed and whined and cried that after I asked him to cut the prison guard I answser to had the nerve to cut more.

I checked the warden’s name to make sure Fathead Gasbag didn’t buy the paper over night. He didn’t, which means WE CAN DO WHATEVER THE HELL WE WANT, bucko! At the bottom of his message, he included my note that stated if he had questions, he should talk to my bossman. I guess that was tantamount to shitting on his car hood because he felt his cache of opinion submissions meant nothing to our prison fish wrap (“Winner, winner, chicken dinner buddy, your opinion means about as much to me as air freshener in the men’s room!” Is what I typed … in a mental e-mail). Hell, the douche even produced stats: 60-whatever total, XX of which were ginormous, pointless, so boring myself – and readers too, I’m sure – would rather shove spoons through my ear hole. At the end of his written-word whine, he said he might rethink writing to our fish wrap. Whereupon I shouted “Hallelujah!” stripped down to my skivvies and danced a tarantella on my desk.

Since that note came I’ve pondered how to handle Fathead Gasbag. Tying him up, drizzling honey over his raisin-contoured nut sack and unleashing flesh-munching ants on the his fogey smorgasbord didn’t have any appeal. Golf cartjacking him on his way to the knee doctor or hip doctor or dick doctor or whatever the hell doctor 70-year-olds visit on a Thursday morning and driving him out to the middle of the desert where there are a lot of empty holes – if you know what I mean.

Instead, I decided to write my own Letter to the Editor, except this is a Letter to the Reader with a target audience of one.

Dear Letters to the Reader:

You can go to hell (that’s right, I might not let you right hell in the fish wrap, but I can damn well write it my letter to you, schmucko). No passing go. No collecting $200. If you don’t like our editorial decisions at our fish wrap here’s a suggestion, convert your 1-bedroom, old geezer-smelling condo into a pressroom complete with a typewriter because I’ve seen how you’ve finger-banged computers and trust me, you’re better off with a Royal than a PC. Then untie the purse strings and buy your own press. They run about $100K, so you might have to lift the mattress up to get at your secret savings – a word of warning, don’t mess up the hip when you lift that urine-soaked mattress of yours. And presto, you have your own damn newspaper. If you want to write a 1,600-word opus on why President Bush is really an alien from the planet Conservo sent here on a recon mission to score some hot, drunk coeds, go right ahead. I won’t stop you. It’s your fish wrap. If you want to jerk off onto page A4 and leave your cottage cheese for the readers in your nursing home, go right ahead. Who am I to stop you? I’m just a prison work camp employee charged with reading your senile ramblings.

And for the record, that’s 1,256 words, Fathead Gasbag.