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PIGS, one of the many things on the list of shit I gotta do is check my PO Box here in Hoboken. It is, of course, a pleasure, and not a chore, though it does take fifteen or twenty minutes away from my day. People like to complain about the post office, but not me. I love the Post Office, and I think the Post Office does a fantastic job. This is not just some hippy zinester postal-love, of which you see a lot–though there's nothing wrong with listing getting mail from strangers or near-strangers as one of your top-three favorite things. No, I honestly think the post office does a great job. For thirty-seven cents–cents!–you can stick any crappy, badly sealed, indecipherably addressed envelope into a metal box and within a few days it shows up where it was supposed to be. Does the PO lose mail? Sure. They're human. Their success record, though, at least in my limited experience, is fantastic. Thirty-seven cents is the fucking bargain of the century. I wish they'd skip these annual fare hikes, though, and just up first class mail to one dollar and let us all get used to that for a while. But no one is listening to me anyway.
Besides all this, I love the Post Office because it might very well be saving my life. Used to be I had all my zine-related mail sent directly to my apartment, for the convenience of it. I liked being able to just wander out to the mailbox in the lobby of my apartment building and get all my mail. Plus, it seemed more convivial. People could read my zine, and if they liked it they could send me stuff, directly to where I lived. I've always loved mail. I've saved almost all of the mail I've ever gotten–there was a time when I kept everything, letters, mementos, everything, out of a misguided attempt at permanence. Now I realize that the one thing we human beings are denied in this existence is permanence, so I've stopped saving so much–though I still keep most of my mail. Sure, I doubt I'll ever need to retrieve issue #2 of Badly Made Amateur Teenaged Zine, but you never know. Once I started getting mail from prisoners, though, and once people started emailing me suggesting that they come sleep on my couch, I began to change my attitude. Where I had once seen my openly published address and listed phone number as a stance against paranoia and bullshit, I began to see them as the first clues the police would ferret out while standing over the chunky pool of blood that had once been me: Cop1: Wow, someone hated this bastard. He's been diced up into tiny pieces. Cop2: Yeah, and they wrote the word bastard in his blood. Several times Cop3: Look! Zines! Mailed directly to this address! Cop1: That solves that crime! It was obviously amateur teenagers. Look–telltale staples mixed in with the blood. Somehow, I changed my thinking on the address front from having my real live home address on the Internet will gain me a lot of slavish followers like Jim Jones to having my real live home address on the Internet will allow weirdos I don't want to meet to find me and murder me using powerful staple gun technology. I guess you could say I finally remembered that my Jim Jones fantasy ends with me addicted to smack and with my head blown off in a tropical hellhole. So, I rented a PO Box and I've never regretted it. The Post Office is only a few blocks away from my apartment, but that magical buffer zone is all that stands between me and you, sleeping on my couch and vomiting in my bathroom. Plus, I can use the exercise, as trekking out to the PO Box is really the only time my heart rate gets above 80. I guess at first I had this idea that hearing from fellow zinesters or fans of my zine would be cool. Cool people, interesting conversations, and, of course, lots of free cocktails purchased for me by grubby, dirty urchins with five bucks to their name, two of which would be on the bar, soaking up the sweat off the beer they just bought me. Jim Jones wanted...well, lord knows what that man wanted, but I wanted my cult followers to buy me booze. The idea was that cool, interesting people would come and hang out with me, not weird and disturbing people. But of course what I slowly realized was that only the weird and disturbing people wanted to come knock on my door and sleep on my couch. Normal people would never do that. Once I realized that, I edited my idea to include the dirty urchins creeping from the couch at 4AM to slit my throat and eat all of my food, or perhaps taking on my identity, living my life, drinking my beer. Oooh, it makes me so angry! But of course, I now have a PO Box layer between me and the Freaks, so all is well. Okay, enough jibber-jabber. You can, as always, complain about the low quality of this column at the usual place. Until next time, bubbas, I remain: Your Humble Editor. Jeff |
July 7, 2002