Dear Family, Friends, and Everyone Who Cares About Me,

I expect you are shocked to find me like this. Good! It is about time you have been shocked! It takes so much these days to rouse the bourgeoisie from its dolor. But rather than accept the universe is meaningless and things happen without reason, I expect you are looking deep inside yourselves for an answer. So let me oblige you by explaining myself.

I picked up my dry cleaning the other day. The bastards burned a hole right through my favorite shirt. On top of that, one of my pocket squares came back slightly discolored. Despondent, I tried to drown my sorrows in food, but my favorite restaurant overcooked my halibut. What kind of creature is your God, who allows these injustices?

The last straw came not a day later . Already perturbed by this tragic series of events, I attempted to distract myself from the drudgery of every day life by writing a treatise on metaphysics. There I sat, hammering at my typewriter, churning out sentence after sentence of philosophy so brilliant and incisive that Immanuel Kant himself would’ve taken ill with one glance at my opus. Then, my idiot cat (and what is a cat but an agent of Loki, that most mischievous of Norse gods?) jumped on my desk and spilled my coffee all over my pants. I went black with rage and burned the manuscript, the desk, and the cat. It was then I decided to end my life.

I’m sure you all understand now. I wish you luck in your own travails through this cesspool you call life.

With some degree of outrage,

Pierre

Analysis:

As far as suicide notes, Pierre Decoeur’s was exceptional in that it immediately made his family and friends get over his death. Not because Pierre actually managed to explain something–no, he was as prone to vagueness and pseudointellectual hypotheses in his suicide note as in all his writing–but because it reminded them how damned annoying he was when he was alive. (Though none of them would admit to being relieved until a drunken Christmas party in 1977.)

Scholars aren’t sure who Pierre referred to when he mentioned “Everyone who cares about me” at the end of the salutation. Assuming this referred to people outside his family and friends, which was only about a dozen people anyway, there is quite a mystery as to whom he might mean. Some have wondered if he kept a private whore for those times when everyone got sick of listening to him.

Late 20th century French letter historian and regular “Let’s Go! Paris” contributor Professor Bic Blade suggests that “everyone who cares about” Pierre might refer “to the ghosts of the French martyrs who went before him and likewise found themselves on the outside of society looking in,” but he’s a prat so who cares what he thinks.