Running is across the wire

Soulja Boy Tell’Em
c/o Interscope Records
2220 Colorado Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

March 31, 2009

Dear Soulja Boy Tell’Em,

I trust that this letter finds you well. I’m writing you today because I’m in love with a brilliant, beautiful girl named Gwynne who lives a thousand and a half miles away in Texas. Soulja Boy, it’s harder than rats being in a long distance relationship. But I don’t need to tell you that. Because I didn’t know how hard it really was until I saw the music video for “Kiss Me Thru the Phone.”

Your video hit the deepest of nerves in my tiniest of hearts. Peep my current situation: as I mentioned, my girlfriend resides in the sun-drenched, bucolic college town of San Marcos, Texas. Ahhhh, San Marcos! Where the booze flows like that river of pure chocolate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and loosely-knotted bikini tops are sartorially mandated by town law every Thursday evening. I’d kill a man to be in San Marcos right now. On Sunday afternoons, when the church crowd lets out, me and my lady cruise the town square looking for trouble in our drop-top benz. We snarl like bobcats at old Methodist ladies, littering all over highway medians, drinking Hennessy with cigarette butts floating in it straight from the fucking bottle. We don’t even fucking care. We’re cold, Soulja Boy. Colder than absolute zero. We’re so cold that our parkas need their own parkas. Soulja Boy, get this, San Marcos is where Mardi Gras beads go on their vacation to get wasted. Soulja Boy, they burn Bibles to keep warm in San Marcos and Einstein’s general relativity theory slows way the eff down in San Marcos. Soulja Boy, scientists have proved that San Marcos is the center of the universe. Soulja Boy, if you partied in San Marcos the way me and my girlfriend do, you’d come home wearing a dolphin costume with multicolored layers of lipstick around your feet like sexy tree rings. You wouldn’t remember the last two weeks of your life and you’d cry and cry and cry. You’d wonder why you felt so hollow inside as you rubbed the polish off of one crucifix after another with nervous hands. Soulja Boy, San Marcos is a where the Mayan Apocalypse will hit first. Soulja Boy, I should also probably mention that San Marcos has any number of reasonably priced, family-owned Mexican restaurants.

I’m moving to nearby Austin in May. For most of the year, though, I live in Reno, where I am pursuing a graduate degree in the humanities.

You’ve probably heard about Reno. And what you’ve heard is probably true. Reno is where partiers go to learn how not to party. Reno is full of sadness. Reno is where the European Enlightenment puts a gun in its mouth. True story: my college roommate, Dpo, stayed in Reno with his brother when he was fifteen, where he was headbutted in a smoky casino hallway by a member of Digital Underground. Soulja Boy, I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

While Reno and San Marcos are only 1760 miles apart, my girlfriend might as well be in deep cryogenic freeze in the moon’s core. Surrounded by the armed, elite guards of the moon people. Guards who take their jobs very, very seriously.

Soulja Boy, I miss my girlfriend, and I’m telling you that because I know you understand what’s at stake when the woman you love is so far away that it makes your stomach hurt just to wake up in the morning, and it’s not because you eat too much yogurt.

When I feel lonely, I seek solace on YouTube. Hey, at least it’s better than chat rooms. Or sitting out on the porch whittling tears out of a bar of soap. If nothing else, I can find something vacuous and soul-sucking to suppress my longing for a while, like watching compilations of Dan Quayle kidney-punching the comprehensibility right out of the English language. Or I can warm the pitch-black cockles of my heart with videos about animals. (Full disclosure:”Racoon [sic] stealing carpet” and “Curious fox gets scared of [sic again] by a fart” are especially good.)

Then I saw the video for “Kiss Me Thru the Phone,” which has soared like a crippled eagle to #2 on Billboard’s “Hot 100″ chart in recent weeks. Since I’ve found it, I’ve returned–again and again, like a Canadian goose settling nervously onto a familiar suburban pond–to your visual meditation on how 21st century technology mediates romantic relationships. Seriously, though. The beat is tight, and sounds like it cost several million dollars and an enormous, sleek bank of computer monitors to produce. Your scarf is tight. Your gray slate fireplace in the background is tight. And holy shit do I ever want to sink into the furniture in that sleek, mid-20th-centiury-German-minimalist loft where your lady lives (see 1:07). Souja Boy, I wish my girlfriend would pony up already and buy an iPhone. She could record herself puckering up, and send it winging across the rarefied air of the Great American West to my graduate-student-living-below-the-poverty-line cellphone, which I could then watch, albeit with more grain and absolutely no sound. And if I got an iPhone, I could (as that part with the Reverend Jesse Jackson [3:03] in your video seems to encourage) fellate the living hell out of the phone and, uh, send that to my girlfriend. She might like that.

… actually, I have no idea if she’d like that.

Sidenote: Is that seriously Jesse Jackson in your video?

Anyway, Soulja Boy, I’m writing you today to tell you that, as much as I admire your video, the Japanese telecommunications companies have you beat.

They created a phone that you can literally make out with. As Slippery Brick reports:

Warning: Creepy territory ahead. Your partner, who also obviously has a Kiss Phone, just presses their lips against the fake plastic mouth of the phone…and they will feel the partner’s simulated mouth on theirs. Yes, it has now come to sticking your mouth on plastic objects. If you like, you can also leave kisses on the answering machine, and replay them over and over, until your lips hurt. You can also download or upload kisses on the web. Their site has a kiss bank with smooches from people like Madonna!

Last winter, I dropped hints for weeks on my girlfriend’s Facebook wall that I wanted a set of these frigid, uncaring lips for Christmas. I am disappointed to tell you that I did not receive a make-out phone in my stocking. Don’t get me wrong–I love the mittens Gwynne knitted me, as I wear them everywhere, they’re warm, they’re my favorite colors, and Gwynne’s knowing hands are to yarn what Renoir was to canvass.

But I can’t leave a “sorry I missed you, so here’s my tongue” message on her voicemail with mittens.

I guess what I’m getting at is if maybe she’d seen your video last December, things would’ve been different. She would’ve sold her jewelry, or even a lock or two of her hair (like in Les Misérables) in order to scrounge up enough cash to buy a hot set of lip phones for her bf.

I guess what I’m really getting that is that all of this is your fault. All of the time. Everything. Everything is your fault.

Also: stop making terrible hip-hop.

Regards,
C. Turner

P.S. I’m honestly not expecting a response from you. My friend Will, after all, wrote you a few months ago. And he never heard back. A number of his questions remain salient and pressing, especially in regards to your original, now-omnipresent hit from a couple years back, “Crank That.” What, indeed, does it mean to “superman dat hoe,” and how, exactly, one is supposed to responsibly “crank that robocop” in a post-9/11 world? These questions demand immediate, satisfactory answers.

Will even made a video, which honestly is one of the most wonderful, stupid, middle-class-white things I’ve ever seen, and posted it to YouTube under the moniker of the Hyde Street Haterz. You never even commented on it. They ghost rode the whip, Soulja Boy, in Oakland. In. Oakland. And you were too busy sipping on Dom Perignon out of a crystal chalice to even fire up your web browser.

______________________________

Days streaked: 10

Total Miles: 39.4

Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running: Burn, Piano Island, Burn and Scarface.