Sending and receiving mail – real mail, not electronic gibberish – has long been one of the many pleasures in my life. I reckon I post over two hundred pieces of mail each year, and while I receive only about one-tenth in return the main point of the exercise, for me, is entertaining myself…and maybe others as well. I find few things more purely enjoyable than sitting at home scribbling with a pencil, giggling like a schoolgirl menaced by a tramp.
One of the forms of mail I most use are postcards of my own making. I simply cut to pc size any cardboard packaging to hand, scribble some nonsensical descriptor across the top on the back side, pencil my salutations, address and post. A marvellous, economical methodology, and inventiveness produces unlikely stationery. Bog knows there’s no shortage of useless packaging in our world, and I’m always on the lookout for something new to feed my designs.
Last summer came a mother lode. I was in a used book store and came across six shoeboxes full of old, unused postcards from all around the world. Eureka! I spent a couple of hours culling and ended up with a rather large stack, so culled again and walked out of the shop with about one hundred of the darlings. I felt like I’d won the lottery. What a find!
I’ve since mailed off about half my inventory. Who knows, maybe you yourself have been a recipient of one of these magnificent missives, scratched your head in wondering when the hell I went to Timbuktu and then, aha! note the stamp. (Stamps are rotten actors in my play and I’m scheming in how to correct this.)
Of course, I felt it incumbent to ensure the bookstore who sold me the postcards would read of my epic journeys, and figuring the two very nice elderly ladies who run the shop would enjoy some mildly salacious verse, I’ve been sending them an imaginary travelogue with the very same cards they sold me. I do hope the dears get a titter or two from my mail, rather than censorious frowns. One always likes to think the best of old people. Just to be sure I send these anonymously because as past visits from the authorities have proven, fun is seldom part of their agenda.
So if you wish to get on my mailing list simply email me your address – your real address, not your cyberspace made-up ego-filled avatar, generalsuperdick, and I’ll do my best to send along content for your real mailbox. Because we all like to get mail, and some of us love nothing more than producing it – whatever “it” is.