And now for a few dissenting opinions

You may have noticed a new ad running in the Inter Lake the past few days promoting this column.

It features an unfortunately large picture of yours truly and some glowing quotes from readers. In order to supply the quotes, I needed to scour through several hundred e-mails I've received in recent months.

Fortunately, lots of them had kind things to say about me and this column, for which I am grateful. But just in case anyone thought I might get a swelled head as a result of being complimented, I wanted to take a few minutes this week to acknowledge not those who cheer me, but those who chide me.

One of my favorites took several hundreds words to tar and feather me as a fascist toady of "King George," but then ended with the always popular debating technique of insulting my appearance: "If you are going to plaster your picture all over a public forum," said this reader from east of the mountains, "please have the decency to get a nose-job."

Fortunately, my mother braced me for such thoughtful analysis when I was 5 year old, teaching me to say in response:

"As a beauty I'm not a great star,

There are others more handsome by far,

But my face, I don't mind it,

Because I'm behind it -

'Tis the folks in the front that I jar."

So there! Mother always knows best.

And while we are on the face, let's move from the nose to the I's:

A certain letter-writer who shall remain nameless recently took the author of this column to task for using the first-person pronoun too often. Admittedly, it is not easy for the person who writes this column (and you all know who he is) to avoid the first-person pronoun insofar as this is a personal column, but one can see now that the challenge is worth it. Alas, even if the author were entirely eyeless like Samson in Gaza, he would still have to pray for the strength to say "I" on occasion - as in "I apologize."

Of course, most people who are unhappy with me don't resort to personal attacks (or personal pronoun attacks, for that matter). Instead, they stick to debating the actual points of my columns, as the lady in the hospitality industry who wrote to call me "an egotistical, arrogant jerk" and told me I should brush up on my reading of the New Testament. She might want to consider a brush-up on her Superhost training.

But clearly the most entertaining of the responses I've gotten from around the world to my column have come from my good friend (note gentle sarcasm) Mike from Seattle, a former Montanan who apparently grew up in Bozeman.

In one of his early letters, he started out by accusing me satirically of being one of those "wise Montanans" who doesn't like "big city know-it-alls," and then proceeded in letter after letter to demonstrate why that is so.

Here are some of his choice epithets for me: "dreadfully pedestrian writer," "mean little SOB," "kind of wacky." But he wasn't content to lash out at me alone; he decided to shoot for bigger game, so he tied me up with the "Christian right" and opened fire:

"We … find you guys a little scary - we suspect you'd string us all up if you had the energy or smarts to figure out how to do it… It's all so damn dreary, fearful and joyless; I guess the promise of heaven is about the only way to drag yourself through the day."

And although he isn't a physician, he decided to play one for my benefit, diagnosing me as suffering from severe depression because I often write about problems in our society with a sense of pessimism: "Talk to your physician, it's very treatable. I mean this as someone who truly cares about helping others."

Thank goodness for "big city secular liberals," as he calls himself and his friends. If it wasn't for their caring concern and love for me, I would still not know that my "dark, dark, nihilistic, depressing description of the world is really a textbook example of depressed thinking… It's a simple chemical imbalance and absolutely nothing to be ashamed of."

And I thought I was just being cute… but then how do I explain the nose?