Dear Alcohol,

Thanks a lot. Last night I dreamt I was a telemarketer again. Selling virtual sex acts to middle-class people of every race and sex. Over the phone. Thanks a lot.

And apparently in the dream, I’d been fired from this job before. Recently. However, call volume was irregularly high and vice versa. So they took me back. Tentatively.

On the computer screen was a huge panel of buttons, each one an audio sex-act recording of a hot woman doing it. For example, top left was the sound of her kissing and moaning. The next one played the sound of licking various body parts. And each progressed from there until eventually you cycled through hand jobs, blow jobs, all out doing it, then finally the really weird ones involving animals and urination. My occupation was to click the mouse on whichever button would keep the client on the line. Because, of course, the goal was to get them to pay five or six bucks a minute to listen to this stuff.

So I’d dial up a random person whose credit-card companies had sold us his data, and the client would answer, “Hello?” Then I’d have to click the first button. No talking from me now, just clicking buttons that, like I said, were audio cuts of women in sexual pleasure. Then the client would try to say no thanks or hang up, but that’s when I’d hit them with the bestiality recordings to hook them in. But we weren’t supposed to go all out right up front. We had to learn to entice them in. We had to prime the pump, as in a seductive mating dance that occurs in nature. And we were only supposed to hit the bestiality or murder-sex buttons as a last ditch effort to keep them on the line. And I quickly learned that like most jobs, it was a delicate art, not a science.

Unfortunately though, I kept hitting the most messed-up buttons too soon, hopefully not as too much of a metaphor for my reality behavior. For example, when I hit the urination-fetish button on this very nice lady who was trying to be helpful, everybody in the telemarketing office laughed really hard at me for so long. The supervisor came over and put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I think that’s enough.”

So they transferred me to another department where we sold recordings of mother’s voices saying soothing things to babies. I know, I couldn’t believe it either. But we actually did call little babies, and we played recorded mother’s voices to them for six bucks a minute. There were not as many buttons on these computer screens, though. There were only eight. They were in order: [I am your mother], [I am here for you], [Have some milk], [You are a good baby], [You are never going to die], [Hush little baby don’t say a word], [I have murdered your father], and the last one, which I am never going to repeat. Because it would blow your mind, and you would think I was a psychopath for dreaming of such a button.

Anyway alcohol, I thought I’d tell you this. Mainly so you could know for what you are responsible. And if I EVER have another dream that ends with something that fucked up, I am going to kill you personally. And if idle threats by me are not enough to discourage you, well you’re still going to have to try MUCH harder than some Psychology 101 Oedipus mind-trick to make me lose it, you unoriginal archetype-parroting FUCK.

Your friend,
Mark Leidner

P.S. —See you later tonight, homie.