Dear Dr. Faux,

My best friend has “unfriended” me on Facebook, but when I called her on my cell she said she didn’t want to talk about it. How can I find out what I did wrong if she won’t tell me why she is mad? I’m very hurt and confused. Please sign me,

Friendless in Fontana

Dear Friendless,

Dr. Faux does not own a computer but has heard of Facebook because he converses with the young people who live in Whisper Valley Trailer Park and gather near the front gate to smoke marijuana and compare tattoos. Dr. Faux enjoys their company even if he does not always understand their language. Dr. Faux once owned an early Macintosh but found that he was spending too much time on a website called Lost Love Finder, searching for his dear Trixie, who once worked for Dr. Faux in his Beverly Hills office. Trix would massage his neck after a trying therapy session (and in Beverly Hills they were all trying) and dust his office while wearing an Old West showgirl costume and singing cowboy ballads with a soulful but markedly untrained voice. She abandoned Dr. Faux when his patients left him for gurus like Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra (Deep The Chop) and his therapy practice failed. Out of his grief, Dr. Faux spent three weeks in Las Vegas in the company of a young woman who, he later discovered, was not a young woman but resembled Trix under the glare of neon and was very understanding. Those were difficult times for Dr. Faux. When his Lost Love Finder search for Trix proved fruitless he began to search on the internet for young women who merely looked like dear Trixie, hoping to find some comfort with a virtual Trixie. A site called Young Blonde Hotties took many thousands of dollars from Dr. Faux and he became so depressed that he had to ask a physician friend to share his personal cache of Percodan, Vicodin and Percocet. After Dr. Faux was found under his Airstream speaking in tongues and endured a stressful intervention and involuntary tattoo session administered by the young people of the front gate, he was able to cure himself of most of his addictions (including the internet) by force of will and the moderate consumption of a low-end vodka given as a premium by Jiffy Lube. Long-sleeve shirts could cover the tattoo, which reads, “Cannabis Rules”; but Dr. Faux likes to leave it exposed as a reminder to avoid the more addictive drugs and to cherish friends, those young people of the front gate, who have shown that they care for Dr. Faux. Alas, his addiction to dear Trix has remained.

Pay attention, Friendless. Did you understand what Dr. Faux just told you about friends and the tactile? The young people of Whisper Valley Trailer Park do not have a Facebook page but they do have each other and the tactile; we must not abandon the tactile. Dr. Faux can now do a fist bump.

Find your friend and shake her and then embrace her. Tell her that you love her. If she doesn’t respond, move on. Humans are made to be touched, not to be Facebooked.

Dear Dr. Faux,

My problem is my daughter is about to marry a young artist and I’m very much against it because I know that he will never make a desant living. That will mean that my daughter will have to do without. But she won’t listen to me. How can I dicurage her without turning her against me? Please sign me,

Not Anti-Art in Albany

Dear Not Anti-Art in Albany,

Dr. Faux takes you at your word and accepts that you are not anti-art, but he further believes that you might have had a lapse of memory as to the meaning of art and its requirements. And he will explain all that to you if the sunlight coming in the window of his Airstream holds and he can keep your question in that portion of his brain that remains alive so late in the day. Dr. Faux should not still be working for it is past five in the afternoon. He should have pulled his Igloo cooler from under his bed and retrieved a single cube of glistening ice, placed it in his coffee cup, and uncorked his Chopin Vodka. The vodka was a gift, part of a full sweet case of Chopin, sent by a former Beverly Hills patient who stays in touch with Dr. Faux out of her appreciation for his therapeutic gifts, a generous woman, who has helped sustain Dr. Faux during these last unfortunate years. It is past five and Dr. Faux should have poured himself a healthy slash of clarity and taken his third reverential sip by this time of day. But the vodka will have to wait for he is working on deadline and must make tomorrow’s mail. Or, as it is now called, snail-mail, for Dr. Faux has no computer or internet and wants no computer or internet for reasons explained above. Tomorrow’s mail pickup assumes that our marijuana-besotted postal carrier remembers to stop at our trailer park. He sometimes chooses karaoke over his postal duties. The owners of the karaoke bar will frequently and gently guide him back to his route with the insertion in his play list of “Please, Mr. Postman” and “Return To Sender.” We hope for his appearance tomorrow. To recap, Dr. Faux has just explained that he is on deadline.

The sunlight has now bisected the page, and is moving off the shining coat of sweet Muffins, one of his two cats, the cat who always sits on the table and watches Dr. Faux as he writes. The light is fading so Dr. Faux must address your question, something about art and a young man and your daughter and your being a caring mother, your solicitous nature. Dr. Faux will be kind with his answer. Please note that there were misspellings in your letter. But please also note that during his twelve-year absence from publication—and, indeed, from life—Dr. Faux has been existing with the aid of the undereducated and the young. Some of the people who have been so kind to Dr. Faux could not spell their own name and therefore Dr. Faux has learned to appreciate the generosities of the ungifted. He has not called your attention to your misspellings of “decent” and “discourage” with a pedantic sic in the body of your letter but gently notes those misspellings here, buried in the second paragraph of his offering to you and his public. But in order to meet the expectations of that public and guide you onto the proper path he must now offer corrections of a different kind, corrections that might not seem generous at first but will be seen as bounteous on reflection.

Your daughter and the young artist. Dr. Faux believes that you taught your daughter well. To love an artist is to appreciate art, and art is the only thing that is right in the world. How did your daughter learn to love a young man who is an artist? Alien insemination? Airborne spores? The Trilateral Commission? Or by genetic chance and a mother who signs herself Not Anti-art. Dr. Faux believes that the latter is the truth. Pay attention: You taught your daughter to love a young man who is an artist and that was your generous gift to her. Do your best to remember that.

Dr. Faux wishes that he could paint. The sunlight is off the page now but Muffins still sits on the table. She has arranged herself so that the remaining light has found her. Dr. Faux would paint that image if he could.

Dr Faux congratulates you on your gift to your daughter.

And now it is time for the gift of vodka. Salut!

Send a generous donation to Dr. Faux in care of this publication and he will ship you his latest book, “Vision Quest: Vodka Excess and Temporary Blindness.”

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