Dear Uptight Seattleite,

I’m Japanese, and I don’t know how to tell my American girlfriend that instead of “Power and Wisdom,” her kanji tattoo actually says, “Afternoon Cow.”

A Fellow Pacific Rimmer

Dear Rimmer,

I have some stuff I’ve been saving up for just the right person, and I think you might be that person. Hang on a sec, let me get my out my Moleskine. “Have an honest introspective.” “Are you willing to make this idea authentic?” “Have the courage to interrogate reality.” And this last one is really the kicker for your case, Rimmer: “The conversation IS the relationship.” Got it? If none of that does it for you, get your own tattoo on some part of your body she’s sure not to miss, one that says, “I love me some cow,” and then give her a kanji dictionary as a gift to mark the end of Daylight Savings Time.

Dear Uptight Seattleite,

Semicolons. I just hate those prissy little bastards. Is there any reason for a modern writer to use them, armed as she is with, I don’t know, periods, for God’s sake? Also: totally sick of writers who always cram in extra crap between em dashes, as if their readers would keel over dead if deprived of even one of their insights.

Riled E. Reader

Dear Reader,

What a lovely and nonchalantly unlooked-for bit of serendipity that your rough but vigorously executed correspondence should reach me just as I’m reclining—spine and casually tossed-about limbs describing a whimsical (and I might almost say Modigliani-esque, were it not for the somber palette of that singular Italian, which looks rather, well, brown, bathed as it is in the neon flood of post-Warhol colors now saturating the visual information soup in which we glug unconsciously along, and thus keeps him at least a Mariano Rivera–tossed stone’s throw from anything that we might pair with whimsy) shape—with the latest New Yorker; that is precisely why the elegant virtues of the semicolon are so fresh in my mind, chief among them its power to bind together the endless, drolly observed segments that make up the sentences of that magazine’s writers, with which power these sentences, chockablock with antique proprieties such as the retention of the umlaut in coöperation, can grow almost limitlessly upward, delicately extenuated sculptures that cheat gravity high into the crisp air of our solemn Northwest attention to their Manhattan pronouncements.

Dear Uptight Seattleite,

I got this voice mail from my mom. Only she thought she’d called my sister, and her message was about me, and what a huge mistake it is for me to move to Portland. I was so mad, I called my sister and, pretending I thought I’d called my mom, left a message telling Mom she should stop telling everyone in town that my sister sleeps around too much. Now I’m afraid I’ve destroyed my family.

Chinese-American Whisperer

Dear Whisperer,

Holy Shiva! That’s one pretzel you won’t be able to unbake easily! But I think one last swig from the Pandora’s Merlot you’ve uncorked might do the trick. Call your mom and pretend you’re your sister and that you think you’ve called yourself. Say that you’re worried your mom thinks you (that is to say, your sister) believe she (Mom) really said those horrible things about her (your sister). Say you forgive her (yourself) for manufacturing the whole thing, and that it’s understandable since she (you) is so emotional about her (your) impending move. Finally, say that since you (all of you) have so much love for each other, none of this nonsense really matters. Click! That, Whisperer, is a little trick I like to call passive affection.

Dear Uptight Seattleite,

You recently summoned a husband to appear before his wife with his dick in his hand and the flag of his surrender tied neatly around his throat like a French Legionnaire grabbing his ankles at the edge of the desert of his frankly unstable emotional state, or something like that. Could you expand upon that please?

Nervous Ned

Dear Ned,

Guess what? Red wine is good for you! Isn’t that great? Why don’t you have a glass, Ned, and just stare out the window at the rain for awhile. And take about 300 deep breaths. You’ll feel better, and I’ll feel better for you. Here I am, toasting your better feelings from my own rainy window.

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