Hello. You’ve reached the Mark LaFlamme Complaint Department. We value your comments. Please press 2, grab a snorkel and jump in the river.

Ha! I kid. I do value complaints. I think that’s plain to see by the awesome collection of them I keep on my desk. If complaints were baseball cards, I wouldn’t have to hang around here in this stifling office yammering on about complaints. I’d sell them to a collector and retire to an island that doesn’t allow complaints on its shores.

And good riddance to the lot of you.

But, really. Criticism keeps a writer sharp and honest. It tells him when he’s becoming lazy and when his train of thought has become offensive or trite. Lord knows I want to be sharp, honest and inoffensive. I’m opening up the mailbag this very second.

The first scalding rebuke comes from a man whom I’ll not name for fear that my legions of fans will rise up and smite him. This man believes that Mark LaFlamme is “too slick.” He writes like a big-city reporter, writes Bob, and yet he lives in Lewiston. “There is just something about him that I don’t like.”

Bob, I can take most of your criticism with nodding good grace, you jerk. You’re absolutely right. I do tend to write about Lewiston as though it were a city plagued with drug-dealing, crime and racial strife. I don’t know what gets into me. Imagination, probably. I see a guy downtown with a .45, handing a Baggie filled with small, pale rocks to another man and I jump to the conclusion that it’s a crack deal.

I ought to know better. It’s probably scrimshaw. Really, really small scrimshaw at $30 a rock.

Slick, Bob? Do you have to call me slick? Have you ever seen me with a shiny leather coat, a pinkie ring or a really expensive haircut? You haven’t, Bob. There is nothing slick about me. Look at my hair. I probably cut it myself. See this coat? A buck and a quarter at Marden’s. Look up slick in the dictionary, you won’t see me on the page. In fact, you might see the anti-me. I’m kind of a dork, Bob.

The next complaint comes from a man who writes the editors roughly 3,000 times a week. God bless him. He writes to take me to task for screwing up the proper use of “lay” and “lie.” Such as “the forlorn reporter lay in the street, a feast for ants, lamenting the way his sorry-ass life took a downturn the very first time someone complained about his grammar.”

Mr. Lay-Lie will no doubt be firing off a new letter to the editor. Because I’m fairly sure I got it wrong again in the dramatic passage above. When whomever it was who created me sent out the final product, he must have had this thought: “Let’s see. I can design Mark’s brain to have full grasp of correct ‘lay, lie’ usage. Or I can make him devastatingly handsome.”

I think it’s clear which way he went.

Still another letter arrived from a pair of women out Naples way. So poisonous was this letter, it took two people to write it.

These women gave me a literary uppercut and a cross to the chin because they incorrectly felt I was making fun of small-town Maine in a recent column (see: “Making Fun of Small-Town Maine, Especially Naples, March 2005).

In that column, I lamented that I could not find my way from, say, Auburn to Bridgton. There is absolutely no way I could have been making fun of Naples because I am unable to find it. Clearly, Naples is on the other side of Bridgton. Or it’s on this side of Bridgton. As far as I know, Naples may be a quaint place under the sea occupied by spongy characters who get into all sorts of mischief at the burger joint.

The same two women (one held the paper, the other worked the pen) battered me into lifelong humiliation by suggesting that people “from away” should not be allowed to write newspaper columns.

When I send these women a bouquet of flowers, I will advise them that I come from Waterville. I lived for a time in Vassalboro and for one hazy week in Bangor. The only thing “from away” about me is the big toe on my right foot. It accidentally slipped across the New Hampshire border once, but I bathed it in special Maine salts for a week.

I’m one of you, ladies. Are we going out later? The sooner you admit that you want me, the better you’ll feel.

Then there was the guy who thought I was belittling flea markets in a column I wrote called “Flea Markets: Why They Suck.”

I wasn’t making fun of flea markets. I was only writing about my impatience with professional flea-market shoppers. Like my wife. Who shall remain nameless.

I’m a little afraid of the guy who wrote the letter in defense of flea markets. I suspect if he ever finds me, a savage beating will commence and it will involve a troll doll and an Elvis-on-velvet type of treasure.

Who needs it?

There’s the guy who complains because I don’t write enough about the violence downtown. There’s a nice, older lady who insists I write too much about the violence downtown. Nice people, both of them. I wish they’d meet, get married, have children, buy a boat and sail off somewhere. Really. Here’s a nice Elvis throw rug with which to adorn your poop deck. Many happy returns.

So, keep those letters coming, readers. I appreciate your feedback. When you see me on the street, notice how I smile and wave. I appear genuinely happy, don’t I? I look like a man comfortable with the life he has built, do I not?

Little known fact: Each night, after work, I retire to my tool shed where I drink $1 bottles of wine and cry until I’m tired enough to sleep.

Ha! I kid.

I don’t have a tool shed.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Send complaints (and directions to flea markets) to [email protected].