ey Jim, this is yourself fifteen years older from the time you would be reading this. By now you should be sitting in a cell block at Hillbrook Detention Center in Syracuse, with plenty of time ahead of you, and nothing better to do than read this letter and hopefully save yourself a great deal of heartache. You are fifteen now, with one year to go on a two-year sentence for grand larceny, so you have at least a year of nothing to look forward to. That should be plenty of time to swallow what you are going to read in this letter.
     A year from now you will be set free, and you will make a series of blind decisions that are going to haunt you later. Maybe you can do it different if you heed my warning. If I told you that if you don’t stop drinking, you are going to end up on the streets, sleeping in parks, subways, and beaches, not washing for weeks at a time, going in and out of jail for petty minor bullshit, and that in as soon as three years from the time that you are reading this you are going to be 110 lbs soaking wet, suffering from scurvy, with your fingernails falling off, your teeth aching and loose and your hair falling out, and that you are going to wake up every morning shaking, with a knot of pain in your gut and blood coming out of your eyes, do you think it might make a difference in your attitude right now? God knows nobody else can tell you anything about anything. Maybe if you heard it from yourself it would matter.
     You will have an opportunity to join the navy in a few years, and your decision to screw that up will be the final mistake that will lead to the fate I warned you about above. You will meet a woman two years from now who will destroy what remains of your childhood. What’s worse, you will let her do it to you twice. You will throw away a promising naval career for a bitch with big tits that knows every button to push to make you her utter spineless slave. It will be collectively the largest series of mistakes you will ever make. And you will regret it for the rest of your natural life.
     You might think about handling the whole thing completely differently. I have an odd suggestion: stay in the service and do what you’re told and and forget about the fucking cunt you think gives a shit about how you feel or what happens to you. Because she doesn’t. You are just a ball of yarn, an easy sucker that will believe every sweet nothing that slimes its way out of her guttermouth. You will be her slave and you will hate yourself for it and you will thank her for the pleasure. She will become the epitome of what you will learn to hate in women. What’s worse, she will also become a model for what you are attracted to in women in the future, all the way down to the superficial physical characteristics. You will allow her to become the primary cause of your ensuing love/hate relationship with women, which will torment you for the next fifteen years.
     When I say she isn’t worth it, stay in the military and take care of yourself, you can trust me when I say that I know what I am talking about. You will have many more encounters with women in the coming years and most of them won’t be much different from the first, simply paler in comparison with the same outcome: you played for a fool consistantly and willingly. These experiences will ultimately turn you into an extremely cold, untrusting, negative, venom spitting presence which will eventually make you so unattractive that even sick predator women won’t want anything to do with you.
     That cold fact will hit home when you are twenty-eight and nearly kill you. The accompanying depression will paralyze you from any desire to invest yourself into anything, be it women, work, or social life. You will shut down and begin to go through a morbid routine of waking up, not having the heart to get out of bed and laying there for the better part of the day, trying to trick yourself into coming up with a good enough reason to get out of bed. You will find that by the time you are thirty, your entire attitude will be based on pitiful regret, deep-seated hate, and a general lack of respect for humanity as a whole.
     You would be wise to take a different road than the one you are on. You don’t know the anguish and self-doubt and regret you are looking forward to: to live with no hope, no dreams, no goals. Loveless apparitions of old self ghosts swirling around and tormenting the true self of who you are, pecking away at the flesh of your soul is what you are looking forward to if you follow the choices in my timeline. You may not live to be forty, this remains to be seen, however. Though what I can tell you is that you would most certainly rather be dead than live another ten years with the attitude that you will have when you are thirty.
     You must follow a different path. Life as you have chosen it will burn you completely out and you will be unable to recover, at least by thirty anyway, and even by thirty you will not believe that life could be any different—the isolation of having to be your own best friend, lover, father, confidant, brother, will suffocate you. You think it’s all a game now. You have a big finger in the air at anything that attempts to correct you. You will find that it is yourself that you are fucking and you will feel when you are thirty as if you have been repeatedly raping yourself for the past fifteen years. I don’t know if writing this letter to you is of any real significance at all, seems like an exercise in futility to me, however I am more willing to follow suggestion today than you are now as you probably can imagine.
     I promise you that if you do not change your attitude about life, life itself will beat you into whimpering fetal-position submission. Consider this letter. It is sincere.