Tin Can + Literary Series
Sabbatical
By Gene Dillon
January-February, 2008

Karen,

I'm really sorry I haven't gotten my column to you yet. In fact, I'm not sure that I'll be able to get to it at all this month. I know I should have contacted you sooner. I've made my deadline every month for five fucking years! What could possibly be so special about this month?

Well, things are kind of unusual. It's not every month that we quit our jobs. It's not every month that we even have an opportunity to quit our jobs.

Anyway, I have to make this quick. I found a motel up here in B.C. with wireless, but I have to get back to them tomorrow, and I'm totally exhausted. They have a certain level of impatience and paranoia that makes me worry about my safety a little bit, but I figured out if I don't piss them off or make them wait, they seem to be more able to trust me. It was hard enough for them to allow a "hairless pink" like myself into their world. Their culture is far more complicated than I expected, having developed and evolved mainly by means of isolationism and the attainment of only the tools and information that they've chosen to let into their lives. They're extremely democratic, but their choices are very final, very black and white. I'm sorry, I'm probably not making any sense. Perhaps because I spent Thanksgiving week among the Sasquatch. (If you decide to publish this email, I leave it to you to figure out if Sasquatch has a plural form; I think the plural of Sasquatch is also Sasquatch.)

Remember that bag of fake money that was left on my doorstep last month? It wasn't fake. Those were real ten-thousand dollar bills! The duffel bag was absolutely stuffed with them. They told me that their people found this canvas bag about seventy years ago, and several people throughout the years have been using it as a seat or a footrest or a pillow. Now it's mine. But not for nothing.

I'll be looking for all the help I can get. When the Sasquatch finally embraced satellite technology, they somehow discovered me on the Web, and through some complex set of criteria, decided that I was a guy who could help them, and they put all their money on me. I gotta question their evolutionary development in this regard, but what can I do now? I'm going along with their plan. Unfortunately, they really like to take their time, so I'm not going anywhere for a while.

As far as the money goes, I haven't turned it in yet. The way I see it, it could be traceable back to some sort of famous bank robbery—the money must belong to someone, and it probably isn't them or me. So I'm being patient with that too, researching ways to move the money just a little bit at a time, so I can make it last. I'm living off of a couple of bills that I swapped with a collector last month.

Say hello to everybody and let me know if you need any suggestions for replacing my column for December. Maybe a rerun of an old piece. But stay away from my Christmastime writings—they are extremly vulgar and depressing.

G