Dear Takeshi

I must apologize for the years it has been since I last wrote.  I am writing to you from my bed in Feira de Santana where I have been laid up with malaria.  While the fevers have not been pleasant, it has afforded me time to reflect upon my useless life.  Useless, you may say?  Yes Takeshi, useless.  For what have I truly done in these past 40 years?  True, the Apurina tribe still exists due to my intervention of Presidente Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's mad plan to raze their floresta.  And yes, was it not my idea to get Vaclav Havel to stop writing about revolution and to start doing something about it?  But how do these things compare to my failure to prevent the extinction of the Pyrenean Ibex?  Their melancholy hoo-hoo cry will echo for eternity within my feverish brain. 

I am haunted by Thoreau's words, that most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.  I am driven by an inconsolable bitterness, that I am such a man.  The dreams of my youth have passed their expiration and there were doors to possibility that are now closed and sealed tighter than the calcium vault of an oyster.

Forgive my melancholy.  The quinine affects me strangely.  However, I fear that it is only unmasking the great hoax that I call my life. 

Gunther