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Round One

You’re in hospital. But it’s not for some pedestrian reason like suffering a heart attack after having a long, hot shower and then masturbating while visiting your parents. No, you are in the hospital because you did something heroic and cool, like destroying the Mountain Dew skate park/pinball machine theme park while fighting Vladimir Putin with a croquet mallet.

That is what you did and due to minor injuries, you’re in hospital. You’re recovering like a champion. No tubes are connected to you and you’ve grown a beard during your stay, even though you could never grow one before. You look good. The nurse who is looking after you is pretty and compassionate and thinks that she remembers you from somewhere. She has soft, cooling skin. You have the first pick in the fantasy baseball draft and you select all-world outfielder Mike Trout, the best player in the history of the universe. Your opponents, like Vladimir Putin when he saw you grab the croquet mallet, know that they are defeated.

Round Two

You are a young girl only just past her eighteenth name day and it is your fantasy baseball draft. Your hair is silky, like it was made from the finest silk of the seven kingdoms; your eyes as dark as the night with no moon; and your skin a pale cream. You are one of the most beautiful girls in all of Westeros, but you don’t think that.

You sigh as you look in the mirror. Who will you select in the second round of your fantasy baseball draft? There are many noble options, so many great warriors available to you, but whom to pick?

It is time. The cruel and maniacal King Joffrey Baratheon fingers his crossbow and suddenly shouts at you, “Pick damn it, before I take your head!!”

You look him calmly in the eye, “My Lord, I pick outfielder Ryan Braun of the Brewers of Milwaukee.” Unexpectedly, the great Braun had fallen due to suspicions of steroid use, and your pick is brilliant.

There is stillness in the room, and then, a faraway wolf howls in the daylight, the dye had been cast and you are full of a confidence you had not experienced before.

Round Three

In spite of the stunning beach, bikini model and sex star Kelly Brook and I were arguing about whom to select in the third round of our fantasy baseball draft. She wanted to take Clayton Kershaw, even though he was an obvious injury risk, while Dustin Pedroia seemed like an obvious choice to me.

“No!” Kelly screamed, splashing into the surf.

I pursued her, grabbing her firmly by the waist, and she turned her slick body toward me, her breath coming hot and fast.

“Goddamn it,” I insisted, “we need to pick a second baseman now!”

“I don’t know what’s right anymore,” she said.

“Yes, you do.”

“Dustin Pedroia, “ she breathed into me, “Dustin Pedroia is our pick,” and then we collapsed into the waves and into one another.

I’m a big fan of the Proust Questionnaire that runs in Vanity Fair each month, and I was wondering if you’d answer one of the questions for me. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Christopher Alexander

Dear Mr. Alexander:

This one is easy.

Confidence.

Only assholes are confident. At a certain point in your life, likely when you yourself were an asshole but only suspected rather than knew it (think your 20s), confidence probably seemed like the cardinal virtue. It was the one thing you truly wanted to have, what you hoped beamed out of your eyes like James Bond sex lasers.

For most, confidence is just another manifestation of bullying. It lacks generosity and usually ends up being a self-referential imposition thrust upon the unwelcoming– like an unbidden boner at a dance class.

Don’t get me wrong, self-assurance is good, it’s inward, but confidence needs an audience, and that audience has to be subordinate. The gift of intelligence, for instance, is to help all those around you feel smarter about themselves, not stupider. The confident person, the one so determined to lead, to write the year’s most decorated novel, get a prestigious teaching position and then marry a headstrong and winsome PhD candidate from old money, all the while snickering at the small humourists working on the margins, never sees this. The confident person wants to win, and there can be no winning unless there is also losing. They solve your problems quickly, mathematically, rather than talk to you about them. They wear sunglasses at stupid times. They are crippled and broken inside and you should throw rocks at their BMWs, for that is always, always, their car of choice.

And the holy ones who ride bicycles are even worse.

Please send all letters to Bitter Writer to mm@michaelmurray.ca or post in the comments section of this page.

I have a pet peeve to air out. I’m always irked when people complain about something not being “proper English.” I maintain that there’s really no such thing; that English is only ever “proper” in a particular context, be it formal, academic, conversational, etc. What’s your proper take?

Tony Martins

Dear Mr. Martins:

I’m glad that you asked this particular question. The absolute worst thing that anybody could ever do to their life is get a master’s degree in English literature. (King Joffrey from “Game of Thrones” has a master’s in literature.)

This flimsy credential will give the holder an inappropriate amount of external confidence and entitlement but actually fill them with a crippling sense of insufficiency and self-loathing because they failed to advance any further in the world of academia. These “masters” think they’re better and more gifted than their less-certified peers but will have realized, deep, deep down in the burning pit of their anger hole that in failing to summit Mt. PhD they’re really not exceptional, just pitifully bound to the notion of external validation. Inevitably, they will take refuge in small, cruel pedantry, rattling on about things like “proper English” in the midst of the most benign, innocuous social encounters. They’re all a bunch of fuckers. There’s no such thing as proper English. We practically communicate through hieroglyphs now, okay? Get over it, fuckers. Whenever somebody says that you’re not using “proper English,” what that person is actually telling you is “I hate my life.”

Please send all letters for Bitter Writer to mm@michaelmurray.ca or post in the comments section of this page.