Ilona Billing has Lonely Friends

An open letter to Ilona Billing, my best friend.

Dear Ilona Billing,

I was delighted to receive an email from you recently and I'd like to start out by thanking you for your brevity. Most of my friends are borderline alcoholics with festering, untreated psychiatric conditions and generally surly dispostions. This I can tolerate, natch, but they are by and large insufferable windbags to boot. So I do appreciate your brevity. In fact, the entirety of your message can be quoted here, without edits (although, charitably, I might suggest a copy editor or two should you have room in the budget for an intern):

"k these married girls don't want to be lonely, so why not have fun with them at www.shesdoingitnow. com opssy delete space before com WO"

Ilona: thank you. We aren't exactly tight, you an I--in fact I don't recall that we've ever met--but it's not a big secret that things have been slow around here of late. And by 'around here' I mean 'having sex' and 'slow' I mean to say 'not happening at all.' I mean, with some of the verb tenses changed or whatever. Oh, and 'with women' figures prominently in that last part, too, I guess. So I'd like to thank you for tossing me a frieking bone.

Don't get me wrong; I mean, in lieu of dating I've had lots of time to develop other, more useful hobbies that are really very interesting but unfortunately too numerous to be named here. But they are rewarding, those hobbies of mine. Sporting events, also. The local teams have been winning and or losing in quite dramatic fashion of late. And the weather, as you know, has been copious. At the same time, all things being equal, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum.

So you have at the very least my gratitude for taking an interest in my personal life; offering to set me up with your friends is just the cherry on top. You are in many ways a better friend than any other friends of mine that have not lifted a finger to help me out in this area, which is to say you are a better friend than the rest of all my friends. Which is to say that you, Ilona Billing, are my best friend.

So, yes: I appreciate the sentiment. But I cannot take you up on the offer. I'm not going to lie to you and say I've never had sex with a married woman, because I have. Not saying I'm proud of it, I just don't want you to think I'm a stick in the mud or anything. It's just that your friends don't sound like they'd be my type. I mean, if they don't like being lonely then why in God's name did they get married? That's just not thinking things through, and I am nothing if not a thoughful man.

I wouldn't be perfectly candid with you if we weren't best friends, Illona Billing, but since we are I will be. You & I are Just Friends and I don't think of you In That Way, so I've never mentioned this to you before, but since you're trying to set me up with your friends I think it's only fair for me to tell you that based on everything I know about you I'm reasonably certain that you, all of your friends, and their websites are just oozing with all kinds of nasty viruses and infections. I'm not judging here, I'm just saying. And I'm a grownup and there are things I can do to protect myself, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. But my computer? That's a horse of a different feather; I can't seem to get these damn comdoms around my monitor without having them break on me. So I guess we won't be making it to shesdoingitnow.com anytime soon. But are you free for brunch this weekend?

Yours,
Gabriel

Weeds has a Retarded Silent Aitch.

An Open Letter to Weeds, a series on the Showtime Television Network.

Dear Weeds,

I don't normally open electronic correspondences from your network Showtime; I happen to think Pat Riley is a greasy, self-satisfied glory-hound who stabbed Stan Van Gundy in the back just as he threw him out the window of a moving car. Point is, I hate everything that might be associated with Pat Riley. This includes the Showtime network, for reasons that should be abundantly clear to you.

Also, a very dear friend of mine works for you and insists she didn't put me on the subscriber list for your network, adding that she would never put anyone on the list for such a crap network. But things have been slow in the old inbox lately, so I opened the message and lo, there was an advertisement for your second season.

Based on the African-American couple standing a bit in the background of the cast photo, I correctly surmised that your show is about selling marijuana in a place you wouldn't normally find African-Americans: suburbia. Without having seen your show, I can say with some confidence that no matter how good it might be, you would have been better off shelling out the extra money it would have taken get Chris Tucker. I mean, did you see Friday After Next? Then again, if you could have gotten Chris Tucker you'd be on HBO, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Because HBO doesn't send me spam.

But seriously, Weeds. I'm never going to watch your show, but I'd like to thank you for giving work to Elizabeth Perkins and Mary Louise Parker. I don't understand why attractive, perpetually middle-aged actresses can't get steady work any more than I understand my own lifelong obsession with attractive, perpetually middle-aged actresses; it just kind of is what it is. And even if the work isn't steady, I don't lose sleep at night about whether or not Meryl Streep or Jody Foster or Helen Hunt or Annette Benning or Barbara Hershey can put food on the table. But Elizabeth Perkins? God, she could have been dead drunk in the gutter for all I knew. I had a crush on her when she was in the vastly underrated Big, which came out in 1988, before Tom Hanks was even a vastly overrated actor. You probably don't remember that, Weeds. But I do.

And Mary Louise Parker is actually more of a thespian than an actress, AND I have her cofused with the girl who played Dorothy Parker in that one movie. Come to think of it, that other girl was in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Hudsucker Proxy, so I'm way off base with that middle-aged thing. Maybe I'm part of the problem here.

But Elizabeth Perkins!

All the same, Weeds, I'm a little curious about your tagline:

"Putting the herb [punct. sic.] in suburb"

I guess you're what passes for an expert these days, so I'll ask you: does one pronounce the first letter of the word 'herb'? You're rhyming it with 'suburb' here, so I assume you're in the 'uuuurb' camp. And that's cool. I mean, in Spanish all the aitches are silent, if you can believe that. But it's worth pointing out--and I don't mean to quibble with you, Weeds, I really don't--that you're broadcast on Showtime and not Telemundo. Although I do wonder if, in that event, you'd have the juice to break El Gordo y la Flaca's stranglehold on primetime Latino entertainment. Maybe if you hired Erik Estrada and his psychic pals, you could make a demographic push. Whatever. Point is, Weeds, that you're filmed in English, and the word 'herbs' has a fucking aitch in it. So maybe you should take that into consideration.

Maybe we should all just put that in our pipes, and smoke it.

Yours,
Gabriel