As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I read her first December letter and gagged, choking on both the content of the letter and the jumbled wreckage that passed for grammar. My friends quickly applied that huggy Heimlich thingie until I was again breathing normally. And then I came to the second paragraph, the one that stated “I am an educator.”

Blindsided by that horrifying claim, I collapsed in a violent seizure, moaned in agony at the writer’s vicious assault on my beloved English language and crawled to my desk, rummaging furiously for an editor’s blue pencil. I was duty-bound to correct the tortured screed using the grading policy of the lovely Miss Lantz, my babe of a fantasy squeeze middle-school English teacher. I deducted three points for each grammatical, syntax and/or sentence structure atrocity, and five points for misspellings (more points off for misspellings since they are avoided by simply opening a dictionary). I gave the paper a charitable gentleman’s F-minus. (The result was an astounding minus more than 300 points.)

Note to readers: For added fun, ask and I shall send you a copy of the “educator’s” original letter so that you, too, can try your hand at correcting it.

The pouty pen wielder has since followed up with several more letters written to any person or publication whose address she could rip from the phone book, even to publications as far away as South Lake Tahoe.

As the letters pile up it becomes clear that her beef is not so much with the Friends of the Library board’s fiscal decisions as it is with the Pollock Pines librarian herself. Since librarians are in no position to become ensnared in asinine political vendetta, I – in my self-appointed role as bully-stomper and slayer of hot-air dragons – gladly enter the dustup to shield our beloved public servant. So the remainder of this letter is addressed to you, the letter-writing bully who just doesn’t know when to put a cork in it.

If that meager FOL fund was indeed meant to purchase local land and build a replacement branch library, let’s get real here. As I understand it the pre-new-rug fund stood at something around 10 large. My arithmetic says at this rate we might raise the $1 million-plus building fund in a mere 253 more years. Factoring inflation, however, by then we will need somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 mil, and that lofty neighborhood does not describe modest Pollock Pines.

Instead of settling in for the centuries-long wait, the FOL chose to spend about $5 grand on a badly-needed new industrial carpet. It would have cost three times that if not for the dozens of hands and backs the FOL volunteered for two days of hard labor emptying the shelves and furniture and later humping back every heavy box of books to its proper shelf. (And hey, bully, I didn’t see your face among the community volunteers).

Replacing the old worn, torn and stained carpet was a serious health and safety issue, not a needless cosmetic exercise, so the FOL stepped in because the county is, as if you didn’t know it, a little short of extra coin.

The FOL, NOT just the librarian, voted to fund the carpet project because, well, that is called democracy. But a democracy expects more from a disgruntled loser than to wage a public vendetta just because the Friends of the Library did not see things her way. Majority rules in this country. An “educator” should know this.

You also criticize the librarian for not spending that money on educational programs and on books, again ignoring the fact that these decisions are made by the FOL, not by the librarian alone. Also, you know that our small building shares the media resources of every other public library in the county. Check the county library’s catalog and if it isn’t available in Pollock Pines the library system will have it sent here in a matter of days. Nor did you cite our local librarians’ work in bringing the outside world to Pollock Pines.

This tiny library offers programs for patrons of every age, including weekly storytelling sessions complete with related arts, crafts and homemade treats for all the kids – provided by our librarians. This year’s adventures included a summer reading program; first-person history from actual holocaust survivors; pigging out at free ice cream socials in the library parking lot; and learning about the bees, inspecting a busy working hive and sampling delicious honeys from a valley beekeeper/educator. We also got to meet and pet a live owl, a fat raccoon, a scary snake, a big-eyed Madagascar lemur and even a five-foot alligator with long, sharp teeth — all arranged by our very own Pollock Pines librarians.

These women and a host of volunteers provide the community’s only full-time cultural offerings. While I don’t know our librarians well, I am often at the library and marvel at the way Wendy and Kris treat every patron as a member of the family, making sure nobody leaves empty-handed. In the face of severely limited resources they are professional librarians thriving under tough conditions (as the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets tough, the tough turn pro”).

So don’t you dare go after either of our librarians with your overbearing, personal agenda-laden letters and hate-mongering. Besides embarrassing the community (others could easily get the impression that your rambling posts are representative of the level of Pollock Pines’ “educators”), think about how it makes you look to all of us who see you attacking people we hold in very high esteem. So how about picking on someone your own size? Someone like, well, me.

I, for one, have no aloha for you and I‘m tired of your attention-seeking bullying. So I’m calling you out right now. Let’s put an end to this at high noon in the library parking lot on any day of your choosing. You load up on all that overbearing self-importance and self-loathing vitriol. I (cue the minor chord Mexican guitar soundtrack) will be sporting a pistolero’s white sombrero tilted low over my eyes and I will be armed with weapons clearly out of your reach: a dictionary, a thesaurus, a style manual, an education … and a life.

To further identify myself I eschew (look it up) the typical coward’s cloak of anonymity. My name is Michael Lopez, and I AM a Friend of the Library

PS: I was in immediate doubt when you claimed to be an “educator,” yet wrote more in the style of a high school dropout than a college graduate. So I did due diligence. and learned that UCLA cannot verify conferring even one degree upon you, much less two. And Ancestry.com does not show you as even a distant relative of the late French artist Marcel Duchamp ─ or did you mean Sonora saloonkeeper Delroy “The Dawg” Duchamp who did, in fact, recently use stencils to paint credible silhouettes of a ram and a ewe on his restroom doors? Recently In your endless posts you complain about people sullying your ancestry and educational claims. So I double-checked and suggest that anyone will learn what I learned in just a few minutes on the telephone to UCLA and online. I mean, you should try to catch up with what the rest of us learned in childhood: Wishing you were someone more important does not make it so.