Open Letter to the Record Store Clerk Who Made A Snide Comment as I Purchased Rod Stewart's "Great American Songbook, Vol. 3"

Okay, first of all, the holidays are coming, motherfucker. And it just so happens that this is for my great aunt. My sick great aunt, might I add. She's mostly confined to the house since her asthma got real bad and it's all she asked for and I'm her favorite goddam nephew and I won't deny the lady who has precious little happiness in her life the one thing she really wants for Christmas.

And what if it was for me? Huh? Who are you to question my taste in music? You, dressed so nattily in your Good Charlotte tour shirt. You, looking no more than a week or two younger than myself and making roughly seven bucks an hour. You, who moments after I left the store were either restocking the shelves with Lindsay Lohan cassettes or embarking on another fruitless attempt to score with the purple-haired girl the next register over.

And yet, here I sit, almost fifteen hours later, with your careless aside still echoing in my head: "There goes a real queer."