Me, I love a good missive. I always wanted to be a letter writerer. My history of actually keeping up a correspondence is spotty, to say the least. The last I did in any seriousness was in college. The difficulty is that I take it all too dang seriously for my health. I want to be, you know, responsive, reply quickly and neatly.

Let it be clarified that yes, I am talking about handwriting a physical letter which you would then put in an envelope, stick a stamp on, and send it through the post office. That kind of letter; what your grandparents (or great, or great-great grandparents) did, when they weren't sending telegrams through Western Union or shouting "ahoy hoy" down their telephonic contrivances.

In this day and age of course, it behooves one to respond with some alacrity if you go down this snail-mail route. Days between responses is practically stone age compared to the instantaneous messages we can send to anyone we are connected to in the world. So: when you're me and you agonize over everything—for god's sake you DRAFT your letters, edit, and redraft—and then, by god again! it's been a month and you still haven't replied! It's not even that the conversation has been that deep or important...! and I would write too much. Pages and pages. And receive a half page reply. Add to that, now I've set myself a standard to live up to. How can this next letter be as good as the previous? Was the previous any good? I DON'T KNOW. My anxiety wasn't helped by having intense crushes on the ladies I was attempting to communicate with. So.

I love books that collect letters from my favorite authors; "The Collected Letters of". You see a whole other side to their personality, sides that do not necessarily feature in their work; who knew H.P. Lovecraft could actually be really funny and endearing, 'midst his more problematic inclinations and all the cosmic horror we know him for (he was also one of the most prolific letter writers ever). Letters are, traditionally, meant for an audience of one. Those that are meant for more are usually those holiday, end-of-year, family updates that remind you that you, personally, haven't done shit in the past year. Thankfully these are rhetorical; no responses are expected. Maybe one of these years I'll write a tongue-firmly-in-cheek annual update.

But I want to focus on the seemingly simple sign-off. In snail mail and email, interchangeably, doesn't matter. Do you just end the letter you're writing, and put your name at the bottom? Sincerely? All the best? Yours, dare I hazard a guess, truly?

I'll bring it down: reading P.G. Wodehouse when I was younger I built a love of those silly old Britishisms of the Edwardian era like "toodle pip" and "cheerio".

I like a good bit of assonance, too; a rhythmic, lilting little phrase, thus my preferred personal sign off:

Cheerios and roses!

I used to love coming up with these sorts of phrases, mostly for my amusement and only on occasion for anyone else's. Life time ago; yesterday. So uh, yeah. That's all. Flowers and generic breakfast cereal. 'til next time.

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* this is from a font I constructed that I call FriedrichWilhelm (get it now). It is imperfect, incomplete of most special characters, but full of personality.