My Dearest Leopold,

Allow me forthwith to beg forgiveness for the unplanned abeyance in our written intercourse...an act which may appear at best mildly indecorous and at worst exceedingly vulgar. And although I wish the former would more correctly apply, I fear you know my loutish tendencies all too well, my dearest friend and occasional nighttime companion. And it is, by the by, a matter of social intimacy (and a rather timely matter at that) which has caused me to retrieve my ink well from under the sheep pelt and find a lump of wax large enough to burn as I put these words to parchment and put my most private parts in your hands. Lo, that it was more than a metaphor.

You see, my kind man and periodic pillow-mate, I find myself in a most indelicate situation not once, not twice, but thrice over, and your calloused yet capable hands are perhaps my only deliverance. I have recently quartered above a smithy, and take my meals with the smith, his son, and their mule. You chuckle, no doubt, as you envisage the warm glow of the forge, the stools around the low table waiting to be pushed in, the family life that I molded myself to like so much pig iron. Alas, there was no chuckling the night that I was caught sneaking from the lad's room en route to the hay loft by the smithy (whom I had serviced only half of the hour earlier...the passage of years have in no way dampened my output, dear
incidental reciprocator.) The smithy, apparently unaware that his offspring and his pack animal had a shared interest, ran me out like a common courtesan. Oh!

And so here it is, nigh upon the eve of Saint Valentine (the attribution-denied penner of great works of romance) and I, your loyal yet infrequent mattress warmer, am wretchedly, dissolutely alone. And this unforeseen separation, crisis of crises, leads us to the crux of the matter: I have no gentleman nor equine escort with whom to attend Va Va Voom! A Sexalicious Social at Rubulad (338 Flushing Avenue) this very Valentine's day. Why, there is to be live music by such well-known cabaret mendicants as Paprika, Lady Rizo, and at 11pm my personal favorite Not Waving But Drowning (the very dose of curative music I had recommended for treatment of rumative colon in my last missive.) There will also be disc jockeys (mmm, the thought of all things jockey transports me to my final vigourously unvirtuous moments with that handsome and pliant mule) - Nickodemus, Ursula 1000, and $mall ¢hange. And oh, the vaudevillian delights of Shanimal, Tanya O'Debra, A. Richard Whipper's Tale of Valentine Woe (a Slutty Puppet Show), and many more. But will I be forced to spend this most romantic day alone, dear intermittent invoker of compromising pet names? Or could you find it in yourself to don your tightest, most buttocks-silhouetting trousers, catch
the next airship out of the Hebrides, and come to my heaving side?

And if you cannot make it here in time for St. Valentine's Day (the Day of Love), surely you will fly in for February 25th, on St. Rumpuspumpus Day (the Day of Wanton Lust for Inanimate Objects)! I will be celebrating that night in traditional fashion, with a magistrate's stained scapular, two large kippered herring, and a well-fondled bust of Swinburne. And of course, no Feast of the Rumpus could reach its engorged and somewhat painful conclusion without the sweet strains of music to render the unyielding flesh more pliable to the sticky demands of holy ritual. I, for one, shall be at Rockwood Music Hall (184 Allen St) at 9 of the clock listening to the dulcet tones of Joanna Erdos and Midnight Show, followed by Not Waving But Drowning whilst I try and subject my masculine decolletage to the rigors of the Rumpus.

So, my sweet Leopold, don't let your booboo buns huggy honey bear languish melancholic and alone through the holidays. Come to me before I do something rash with this herring.

Plaintively,
Ferdinand