Hi daddy. Yesterday I went to get a chair. It was in Buford. When I was leaving there, TomTom did something crazy... it warned me of a 13 minute traffic delay between there and Alpharetta. So, as is typical, I rerouted to avoid the traffic. Within a mile, I was passing a place I've been only once.

I passed the place. What should I call it? It sure as hell isn't a "resting place."

I waited there for them to come get me on May 23, 2012. I had arrived early. They told me to wait in the parking lot, and they'd come around to get me before they started. An hour later I was still waiting, confused.

They finally came to get me, and I drove around the bend slowly.
 I drove past the shanty-town graves littered with handmade notes and cheap plastic flowers--the kind sold in crack pipes and dollar stores.

Interspersed between them--yet worlds apart-- sit the lavishly ordained headstones of those buried with dignity. You'll know them by the smooth, cold marble. You'll know them by the size of the stone that seeks to immortalize them. You'll know them purely by virtue of the fact that the groundskeepers actually clean and tend the grassy plots.

So I drive into the mire of the grassy knell where, six feet below, prince and pauper alike are eaten by the worm. I drive to the place the state has chosen for you--rather, for your mortal shell. I drive to watch them put you in, so I can say goodbye and throw something of me in the ground with you. Yet I arrive to find that they've done it without me. The last shovel of dirt has been cast, and now they pat it down tight.

They told me they would mark it with something temporary--temporary like your time on this earth.

Yet yesterday, I passed by and there was nothing.

No plastic flowers
No handmade notes
Nothing signify you ever existed

I hate this world and this life sometimes, when I feel so inadequate. I promise you, daddy, you'll have a stone. I swear to God in heaven that you'll have a stone before the winter is here.

I love you daddy.