Dear simpleton, I, too, am a long-time collector of handwritten street flotsam. (If you want a real heuristic challenge, by the way, you should venture out of your bland Pacfic Heights and Marina captivity, and seek out the crazed purveyor of apocalyptic motorcycle designs, who distributes his incredibly precise and closely composed xeroxed diagrams of the coming Chopper Rapture on Mission, between 14th and 16th Streets.) While many of your readings here strike me as sound, I can't help but think you've missed an important feature of the work of Justine--the strategic insertion and omission of punctuation to produce disquieting linguistic ambiguities, and occasionally outright aporias. Consider your first quoted passage--her ruminations on the health of Eric, her correspondent. She wishes that she could take care of him, she writes, "but I can not so take care of yourself." Ponder for a moment the odd vocative pause between "can" and "not," which darkly suggests that perhaps Justine could in fact take care of Eric, but for some reason unknown to us actually chooses not to. The hesitation opened up by this spacing device leaves us wondering whether Justine is on the brink of some emphatic rejection of Eric's well-being, intended perhaps to be voiced in Valley dialect (as in, "I can--NOT!--so take care of yourself"). More charitably, we could also conclude that Justine is, by her use of linguistic ambiguity, trying to dramatize her own confusion over the range of her actual volition (as in, "I can...not [?] so take care of yourself.") This reading would of course buttress your theory that Justine, like many San Franciscans, has subordinated her own subjectivity to the exacting group discipline of a cult of some sort. But what's really interesting in this passage is her omission of the comma, which opens up the possibility that the whole predicate clause of the sentence is simply a redundant (and again, rather cruel) reformulation of the opening sentiment, "I can not," rendered in a strangely anachronistic, nay, monarchical voice. As in: "I can not so take care of yourself, nor would it ever enter my mind to so take care of yourself." The reader cannot but help but wonder just what it is Justine wants to express; and cannot but feel a certain alarm for the sickly Eric, trying to figure out just how he fits into this vertiginous picture. Nor is this punctuational sleight of hand some isolated caprice, to judge by the evidence you cite. Later, you have Justine flatly intone, "It is ok here, it is not so bad." Had she followed grammatical convention and separated these assertions with a period, we would feel more confident in her estimation of the situation. It would be a clipped, nearly military, chin-lifting assertion of inner stoicism: "It is ok here. It is not so bad. I will endure, and prevail." But the comma plunges the reader into another epistimelogical swamp. Is Justine saying that to be "ok" and "not so bad" are really equivalent states? Or is she expressing some fundamental indifference to the qualitative nature of such claims? What are we--and Eric--to think? Also this: "It is womens group today so, more later." Again, conventional grammar demands the comma should succeed "today." What is Justine driving at? To paraphrase our president, it depends on what the meaning of the word "so" is. Strictly speaking, the misplaced comma has left us with a dangling intensifier on our hands. Again, the ear recurs to a faint Valley echo, as in: "It is, like, SO, women's group today." The confusion is compounded greatly by weighing the sentence that precedes this one, which reduces the entire sentiment here to a nearly hermetic state of redundancy: "Well, its a group so I have to end, and I will write later." Note in addition that Justine cannily inserts a comma to separate the two independent clauses--thereby honoring an oft-abused grammatical rule-- *while again leaving the telltale "so" unpunctuated.* Is there something about the notion of "group" that demands it be accompanied by the unadorned "so"? Is Justine trying to telegraph to Eric some important characteristic of the group that will go undetected by her cult captors? Is it perhaps a sewing group--suggesting that Justine not only is a cultist, but a sweatshop worker? I grant this is a rather outlandish reading--but we are obviously dealing here with a master of supple wordplay, driven, moreover, by her circumstances to convey her true condition via carefully modulated discursive indirection. And, finally, I cannot imagine why you so blatantly overlooked the significance of Justine's postscript envoi, "Love, Me." Occurring as it does outside the formal body of the letter--and knowing as we do how Justine has mastered the art of distilling her desires in the dizzying sleight-of-hand of punctuation-play--how are we to avoid concluding that this is not a signature at all, but an imperative, and, verily, a cry for help: "Love Me." Here, in the tiny compass of a postscript, Justine is letting Eric know that, for all the foregoing uncertainties, terrors and anxieties that her pen has doubtless stirred in Eric's heart, she stands in rather abject need of his care. (This, mind you, after apparently disclaiming any scenario in which she could care for him herself--and in spite of the clear caution against any prospect of reciprocal affect conveyed in the narcisstic capitalization of "Me.") This is why it's so puzzling that you identify her with de Sade's Justine. If she is anyone's Justine, it is Durrell's--a vector of pure, impossible longing, inhabiting a landscape of spiritual obsession and metaphysical displacement, pleading for a devotion that the world has long condemned to darkness. Don't even get me started on "KOK." Chris Lehmann lehmann@newsday.com

Dear Chris, It is precisely that veiled, needy command to "love me" that truly indicates the adolescent mentality of anybody who uses the phrase as a signoff. I do recall that Nicole Brown Simpson, in addition to dotting her i's with either hearts or smiley faces, also used the "love, me" signature - an early tipoff that she had the mind of a child. Which of course makes her murder all the more horrendous, since she was, in brain years at least, still a minor. Of course I knew somebody would scoff at me for the hints in my essay that I rarely leave my comfortable Marina/Russian Hill neighborhood. What can I say? I'm getting too old and crotchety for those doses of straight-up street reality that sustained me in my youth. I find the teenagers who attend the high school across the street keep it real enough for my purposes. yr pal, Tim

February 15: George X

Dear simpleton: Enjoyed the praise of the man, and was impressed by your inclusion of his detractors, Gore Vidal being one of them. What's with this Vidal? He has worshipped the Massachusetts K-clan, and stands behind His Slickness. Greatness in his eyes must be measured by the enormity of the peccadillos. JEBRA6@aol.com

Dear JEBRA6, I know nothing of Vidal's fondness for large peccadilloes, but what amazes me is that he can still think making fun of great American statesmen is, like, really wicked and transgressive. And he's not an unintelligent man. I think you have there a sample of why many people still think "Kill your television" is a bold revolutionary statement. He's also related to Al Gore, which may help explain his being well disposed toward the man Bob Grant calls "The Slickster." yr pal, Tim

Send word to simpleton Previously in simpleton: February 23, 1999: Answer man Our first-ever advice column February 19-22, 1999: Absolut simpleton Rolled in the cold February 18, 1999: Loco-grams Found messages from the marginally insane February 17, 1999: Dear simpleton Reader Mail, volume 27 February 16, 1999: The Booze Liberation Page Hemping for a drink February 15, 1999: George X Our First President not fully appreciated A century of simpletons in the simpleton archive. Find an almost-total listing of Tim's outside works in The Compleat Simpleton. Wankers of Arabia New readers are invited to join the simpleton mailing list announcement of new features and attractions, along with value-added commentary from the simpleton staff, which is not available in stores! To get on the simpletonians mailing list: 1) Send email to majordomo@freedonia.com 2) Write the following message (and nothing else) in the body of your email: subscribe simpletonians 3) Press "Send" on your email. Now you are subscribed to the simpletonians mailing list. If you have trouble following these instructions, email me and I'll add you to the list. Tomorrow: More found objects http://www.simpleton.com