My brother Tod gets the most amusing hate mail from the strangest people:

You’re perhaps the most unlikable, trivial, angry person I’ve ever read
online. You would be an incredibly successful female middle-school
student. Try inserting a few spurious capital letters and misspelling
(more) words, and you could fit right in at MySpace. Your photograph
looks very Arabic and not very Jewish, and it’s also extremely creepy.
Some people were born to write (not you) and some born to be
photographed (not you, either).

Naturally
my Arabic-looking brother, who clearly has too much time on his hands since my Mom moved from his neighborhood to mine, responded right away and asked the writer to be his mentor. He wrote, in part:

My mother and father, while both Jewish, were apparently quite ugly,
which lead to the unfortunate photo of me you saw that apparently makes
me me look Arabic. I guess looking Arabic would be a bad thing? I’m
sorry if my Fertile Crescent appearance in that photo doesn’t please
you, my mentor, but I assure you that there are other photos of me
online where I look Italian, which might please you. There are also
some where I look Persian, which probably wouldn’t please you too much.
Others still make me look like a Russian Jew, which I am, but that
might make you think I’m a Communist. I assure you, Neal, I love
America and am not a Commie. I do like Russian dressing, but only on a
certain chicken dish…

[…]I’m sad that you find me the most unlikable person online. That means
you’ve never visited my brother’s blog. He could use your help, too,
Neal, to see the way out of failure toward success. […]Will you be my life coach? Will you teach me how to write midnight
letters to novelists who you stumble upon while searching for the
lyrics to The Ballad Of Irving? That was you, wasn’t it Neal? Writing
me from the Lutheran Medical Center in Denver? Neal, I feel safe in
saying that I need you in my life now more than ever.

Neal immediately wrote back:

Now, the most important part of my advice. Masturbate one more time (it’s the closest you’ll come to  losing your virginity) and then kill yourself. Don’t stretch it out for twenty-odd more years of sucking dick to pay for your meth, getting turned down by crack whores, and constantly referring to your family as if anyone knows them. Just get it over with.

I am not kidding, the world will thank you. Your funeral will be a party, and we’ll enjoy dancing around your unmarked cardboard box.

Neal also cc’d his lawyer on his reply, which is the perfect punchline to the whole thing.  I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at a blog post (though it was probably one of Tod’s famous Letters to Parade columns).