Friday, March 15, 2002

Our far-flung correspondents.

For some reason, for the last week Limited Inc is getting an alarming amount of traffic. In the high 20s, messieurs et mesdames. Yes, the views we ventilate here are slowly seeping into the Weltgeist, where, like CFCs in the stratosphere, they will do their silent and peculiar damage.

The last post elicited a nice little letter from D., who said he liked it, and his wife, who said what are you thinking of, describing D. as drinking like a fish. We replied that we were not saying D. was in any way an alky: "A drunk is a guy who is always longing for a drink; this is the exact reverse of the true artiste of drinking - in which case, the drink is always longing for the guy. The act of drinking, in the latter case, is just obliging the angel of history. Who is always saying: another round for my friend!" That post also elicited this opinion from the habitual scourge of Limited Inc's ill thought out attempts at humor, Alan C., who said he could reply to me in a on the one hand, on the other hand manner, but would be "brief and
polemical instead:"

"Freud said that the goal of psychoanalysis was to free people from neurotic
misery and to make it possible for them to experience ordinary human
unhappiness. Antidepressants and other psychiatric medications can in fact
do that, a lot more effectively than psychoanalysis ever could. Some of
your remarks seem to me to reflect an inability to understand the
distinction."

Our favorite Memphis-ite, M.B., who once had to travel through Round Rock on her way to a teaching gig in some Texas outpost town, liked the Round Rock post. As did the particular European woman mentioned in it. So, Limited Inc is just love festing with the good vibes, right? Well, we must be doing something wrong to please people as much as we have this week. Hmm. We'll try harder in the next couple posts to be really contrarian and mean-spirited.

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