I wept when I read this disheartened retirement letter, for myself and your readers, because your satire is a gift to the literary world the likes of which has not been written since Mark Twain wrote to mock his fucked up society. For you, however, Allan, I am overjoyed that you have saved your life, your soul, your sanity, your sense of humor, before it was forever lost to the evil politics in which you immersed yourself like an undercover cop who must become addicted to heroin to bust the kingpin. I worried about your happiness often as I read your satire and was made happy by you. This letter of yours brings me up to speed on what I missed of your journey while I was wallowing in the trouble I caused for myself in my career and had to stop spending time with your articles so that I could try to extricate myself from the shitstorm. I’ll tell you about it someday, meanwhile, I’m glad you will be writing of other humorous topics, not writing at all, or letting Trump have it occasionally so that you can find peace and contentment for the first time since you started this crazy crusade. I enjoyed going along for the ride with you (even if I did have to lay low for awhile) because you are so fucking funny that I bow down to your brave genius and selfless benevolence, satirical wit and creative intelligence all done for the good of the American people with purity of heart and riotous indignation.

Your collection of satirical writings, time will show, will be taught in the college literature courses of the future alongside Swift and Moliere as the iconic American satirist of our time and potentially of all time. Students hundreds of years from now will be writing essays analyzing, for example, your use of pussy-grabbing references as symbols of the sexism of the age, the idiocy of the disgusting political leader the references were used to mock, as well as a reflection of the base society from which your writing arose; a reflection of your audience who laughed with you and enjoyed your raunchy humor even as we knew you must have shed a tear on your keyboard because the political problem your words were fighting against wasn’t funny at all.

Do not for one minute think that you failed in what you set out to do by retiring before Trump left office. He will never forget you. You will haunt him mockingly forevermore and he will know HE was the failure in what HE set out to do. Your satire will go down in history as the mirror to the blight Trump cast on the good name of POTUS. It is important that you know that you set out to do something impossible from the get-go because the man is too dumb to leave the office even after you and everyone else has shown him that he must, for his own sake as well as ours. You gave him the benefit of the doubt when you thought he might be smart enough to be affected by your constant and continual reminder that he is an ass who should hand over America to someone with competence. How could you have known back on that October day that the Orange Accident was actually so stupid and selfish that he wouldn’t have the sense to leave the welfare of the country in better hands than his tiny own?

Allan, what you have done has surpassed what you set out to do. The research that went in to each article you wrote was of epic proportions. The diligence and persistence of daily writing would exhaust even the most healthy of marathon runners yet you never faltered or gave a rest a second thought even after I and others suggested it. But the most astounding feat of all is neither of those two momentous achievements, rather the consistent high quality of your satirical humorous writing. You must have felt that you were taxing yourself and surpassing your own expectations of what you knew you could do. You must be looking back on your volumes of clever, witty, funny and poignant articles and thinking, “Wow. This stuff is excellent!” Because it is, on so many levels. Every writer knows that humor is the most difficult of all writing. Every satirist knows it is risky to write satire because there are too many ways it can fall flat, miss its mark, be misinterpreted or offend the wrong person. Everyone of your intelligent readers has respected the intelligent ways in which you attacked Trump relentlessly without sacrificing sophistication. Your writing is outstanding and some of it is in the realm of untouchable unqualified perfection. For years your writing has affected your readers in intense ways, kept us riveted, coming back eagerly for your next installment without getting bored or thinking that you have become repetitious or inane. Each new article was exceptionally funny in its own right. You probably didn’t think you would have to carry on as long as you did and as a result, you honed your skill to a level of excellence that deserves literary accolades and a Nobel prize. The scope of political and social topics you satirized is wide so that you kept finding new and different reasons to criticize the stupid buffoon, leaving your readers in awe of your amazing talent. You have retired after a long, fulfilling, successful career. I am proud of you for your unbelievable writing achievement and also your wisdom in stopping it now.

You have changed my life, Allan, as a result of what you have written as I’m sure you have affected the lives of countless others as well. I have a love of satire now that I did not have before I started reading you. I have been inspired by your example to write courageously in a way that is honest to myself, difficult, but important and worthwhile. Because of your humble, one-man political resistance I know that one person, one writer, can have a profound effect on his world and its people and I will not doubt that if I choose to try to make a difference in our world myself. Because you have opened yourself up to me honestly and personally you have helped me to be a better person and writer, and have given me a more positive self-image and a new insight into myself and my life. You have inspired me with hope — shown me that I am worthwhile and my writing, should I undertake it, will be meaningful and important. Your own hopefulness and refusal to be defeated by the horror of the dark days of Trump’s presidency kept me from despair and kept me from giving in to depression and hopelessness when my own miserable life was a wretched train wreck of disaster.

I will never forget you, and not just because I bought all your books and Hard Hat Harry videos that sit on my shelf as a reminder of you, but because you have been a positive influence in my life that has made an important change in me for the better. I am grateful to you for your kind words of encouragement to me, a total stranger that you took the time to get to know a little. I can not think of you without also thinking of Elfie and whenever I do I can’t help but smile. I hope that you guys find your way to happiness and lightheartedness and forgetfulness and that you live out your life in joy with your lady love. I hope that you will continue to write so that I can laugh with you without censoring our language at the stupidity of people and the humor in the days of the lives we lead in America. I hope that you will forgive yourself for whatever self-condemnation you are hiding deep inside your soul because you are the bravest, most patriotic, and honorable man to fight this resistance and you have done nothing wrong. You will heal from this wild, self-imposed writing assignment in time because you had the fortitude to know when to give up and go home before it was too late to save yourself from its bitter effects. You will begin to see the positive impact your long stretch of wonderful, whacked-out, worthy work has had on yourself, your country, and all of your loyal reader-admirers if you haven’t already begun to see it yet. I hope that my words have shed a little light on it for you because reading your articles was fun for me and I enjoyed each one and I loved how they were alive even after you published them as final drafts because of the comments and conversations that followed from them. You are remarkable in that you respond to every single person — and in a positive way too. You’re one in a million and I am glad that I was able to live to take part in your legacy. I was deeply touched by your listing my name among the others who helped to carry you through to the end of this chapter. I hope that one day I will be able to meet you; and I want you to know that you (and your travelling companions) have an open invitation to crash on my futon for as long as you want to visit in Southern California. We have good wine here, you know, and I do have some sordid stories to tell you when you get here.

Congratulations on a job well done. You rock!