The Letter from Flo

Someone named Flo found this journal and wrote in. His opening disclaimer was something like: No, I’m not female and I don’t want sex and so on… okay, the latter we forget anyway, because if I were female I’d probably have a… wait. What am I saying. He recovered, called the blog an absolute knockout, said he’d seen plenty of weblogs but this one genuinely did something for him. Signed off from Mosbach, Baden, or whatever is going on here.

There’s a specific pleasure in a letter like that. Not the praise exactly—though the praise is nice, obviously—but the texture of it. The false start about sex. The self-interruption. The final shrug at his own location. It reads like someone thinking out loud, which is the best version of correspondence. I keep those. Not in any organized way, not filed anywhere, just in the general sense that they stay with you longer than they should. Flo from Mosbach: I hope things are going okay out there.